Re: URI lifecycle (Was: Owning URIs)

Hi David,

On Tue, 2009-05-19 at 11:07 -0700, David Huynh wrote:
> David Booth wrote:
> > . . .  "The URI Lifecycle in Semantic Web Architecture":
> > http://dbooth.org/2009/lifecycle/
> > [ . . . ]
>
> David,
> 
> I'm interested to get a sense of the coordination costs of these rules, 
> and the costs of enforcing them, for both large publishers (company, 
> institution) and individual authors (bloggers). (The Semantic Web is, 
> after all, for everyone, not just large publishers.) Have you tried to 
> follow these rules within a small group of people, preferably without 
> Semantic Web experts?
> 
> By coordination costs, what I mean is this. Today on the Web, if I want 
> to point from my site to another web page, I don't have to ask anybody 
> for permission, or sign any contract, or have any expectation, or set up 
> any meeting, etc. Zero cost of coordination. That's very nice, and 
> perhaps important in bootstrapping the Web. How does this mode of 
> operation change when I need to deal with URIs? Will it be difficult 
> enough that it will become exclusive?

That's an interesting question.  Overall, I think the coordination
requirements are similar in principle, though perhaps not in in degree.
For example, if I were to add a link from my site to another web page I
would likely take a look at the destination page before doing so, to
ensure that it really says what I think it says.  This is analogous to
Responsibility #3 ("Use of a URI implies agreement with the core
assertions of its URI declaration"), though not exactly the same.
However Responsibility #4 definitely goes farther ("The statement author
making new assertions SHOULD compute the transitive closure of the URI
declarations for all URIs used, to ensure that they are consistent with
the author's new assertions").  But since that step can be automated in
a tool, and since the statement author is somewhat likely to want to
check the consistency of his/her assertions with the URI declarations
and ontologies used anyway -- in the least to avoid embarrassment --
this this may not be as much of an issue as it might first appear.

However, I don't think "coordination" is quite the right term for the
work that's being performed, since each of the responsibilities outlined
in the paper is done unilaterally by one party at a time, rather than
requiring two parties to actively engage with each other.   


-- 
David Booth, Ph.D.
Cleveland Clinic (contractor)

Opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect those of Cleveland Clinic.

Received on Wednesday, 20 May 2009 02:56:38 UTC