Re: (Lost in the noise perhaps - so asking again) - Is a trailing slash 'better' than a trailing hash for vocabs namespace IRIs?

Hi Martynas,

On Wed, Oct 12, 2022 at 12:36 PM Martynas Jusevičius <martynas@atomgraph.com>
wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 12, 2022 at 1:23 PM David Booth <david@dbooth.org> wrote:
> >
> > On 10/11/22 20:53, Pat McBennett wrote:
> >  > [The slightly reduced efficiency of a slash IRI] is a price well
> >  > worth paying . . . [for] a single, simple piece of *guidance*
> >  > to follow . . . .
> >
> > +1
> >
> >  > [Complex guidance] is precisely what results in newbies running
> >  > screaming to the hills... :)
> >
> > +1
> >
> > To reap the benefit of this lengthy discussion -- i.e., to prevent
> > it from being viewed as merely bike shedding -- I suggest that this
> > guidance (to use slash IRIs) be written up as an RDF Community Group
> > "Best Practice" document published on the W3C website.   That should
> > give it sufficient search engine mojo for people to easily find
> > it.  And -- *after* the up-front-clear-and-simple guidance -- the
> > document can also summarize the rationale for that guidance, and also
> > summarize reasons why hash IRIs might occasionally be used instead.
>
> What effect will such Best Practice have on the thousands of
> vocabularies already out there in the wild?
>
>
[PMcB] I'd suggest no effect at all (as David says too!).

Any client code, today or tomorrow, will always have to deal with the
vagaries of the wild-wild-west of vocabs out there - both the thousands out
there already, and all the thousands still yet to come - as any Best
Practice can only ever be guidance anyways, which anyone is always free to
ignore. So it'll always be 'wild' out there, regardless of having any Best
Practices or not.

To be honest, my intent in trying to create some clear, simple Best
Practice guidance here is just to try and draw some kind of
line-in-the-sand - i.e, from some point-in-time of consensus, vocab
creators can have a somewhat easier time (i.e., less choices for them to
make on their own when getting started), and if a common set of Best
Practices really do come to be adopted (for new vocabs, and potentially
updates to existing vocabs (e.g., Schema.org and gist go through regular
updates!)), then tooling, libraries, apps, services, etc. can begin to
start taking advantage of that growing body of consistency and conformance.

Those tools/libraries/etc. won't *ever* be able to depend-on or require
vocabs to conform to these (or any) Best Practices, but it can only help to
make the current state of Linked Data vocabs somewhat 'better'.

And, just hypothetically, if a widely agreed-upon set of Best Practices
really did get adoption, then perhaps a standards-based community, or a
specific industry domain, or governmental consensus (like Interoperability
Europe
<https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/nifo-national-interoperability-framework-observatory/european-interoperability-framework-detail>'s
efforts (which I know very little about!)) might begin promoting the notion
that all standard/industry/government-conforming applications/services MUST
support this agreed set of Best Practices.

But just to David's point though - I don't think we've yet reached any form
of consensus on this slash vs hash debate at all (let alone the
splittering-off Best Practices of `rdfs:isDefinedBy` (or whatever
predicate), and namespace IRIs returning 'all-vocab-metadata'). But yeah,
sure, I'd be delighted to kick-off writing up an RDF Community Group
"Best Practice" document published on the W3C website if we could reach
consensus on those points (I'm not regularly on this mailing list at all,
so I've no idea how such things 'work' in practice!).

>
> > Thanks,
> > David Booth
> >
> >
>
> *Pat McBennett*, Technical Architect

Contact  | patm@inrupt.com

Connect | WebID <http://pmcb55.inrupt.net/profile/card#me>, GitHub
<https://github.com/pmcb55>

Explore  | www.inrupt.com




On Wed, Oct 12, 2022 at 12:36 PM Martynas Jusevičius <martynas@atomgraph.com>
wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 12, 2022 at 1:23 PM David Booth <david@dbooth.org> wrote:
> >
> > On 10/11/22 20:53, Pat McBennett wrote:
> >  > [The slightly reduced efficiency of a slash IRI] is a price well
> >  > worth paying . . . [for] a single, simple piece of *guidance*
> >  > to follow . . . .
> >
> > +1
> >
> >  > [Complex guidance] is precisely what results in newbies running
> >  > screaming to the hills... :)
> >
> > +1
> >
> > To reap the benefit of this lengthy discussion -- i.e., to prevent
> > it from being viewed as merely bike shedding -- I suggest that this
> > guidance (to use slash IRIs) be written up as an RDF Community Group
> > "Best Practice" document published on the W3C website.   That should
> > give it sufficient search engine mojo for people to easily find
> > it.  And -- *after* the up-front-clear-and-simple guidance -- the
> > document can also summarize the rationale for that guidance, and also
> > summarize reasons why hash IRIs might occasionally be used instead.
>
> What effect will such Best Practice have on the thousands of
> vocabularies already out there in the wild?
>
> >
> > Thanks,
> > David Booth
> >
> >
>
>

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