DBpedia URI changes

[sending this mail to semantic-web@w3.org because dbpedia-discussion@lists.sourceforge.net does not work for me]

hi all,

we are planning to upgrade the DBpedia version used for our app from 3.8 (2012) to the current version.

It seems that when a Wikipedia entry changes its URL, so does the corresponding Dbpedia URI. This is of course a no go and I don't know why the team decided not to keep the old URI in that case but I'm sure there were good reasons.

So the currently used DBpedia version 3.8 has both

 http://dbpedia.org/resource/Brown_Pelican

 http://dbpedia.org/resource/Brown_pelican

with no triples connecting each other. The users of the app I am maintaining have used the Brown_Pelican URI which seems to be the older one.

The current DBpedia has made Brown_pelican canonical and has the following to say about the old URI:

 http://dbpedia.org/sparql?default-graph-uri=http%3A%2F%2Fdbpedia.org&query=select+%3Fp+%3Fo+where+%7B%0D%0A%3Chttp%3A%2F%2Fdbpedia.org%2Fresource%2FBrown_Pelican%3E+%3Fp+%3Fo%0D%0A%7D&format=text%2Fhtml&CXML_redir_for_subjs=121&CXML_redir_for_hrefs=&timeout=30000&debug=on&run=+Run+Query+

There is no owl:sameAs link but a dbo:wikiPageRedirects from the old to the new URI.

Why is there no owl:sameAs triple generated for every dbo:wikiPageRedirects?

What possible problems could arise if our app treats dbo:wikiPageRedirects like a owl:sameAs assertion?

Is it possible that URIs changed without a corresponding dbo:wikiPageRedirects triple documenting the change?

Regards,

Michael Brunnbauer

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