Re: uri, urn and info

On 2003-10-08 00:45, "ext Eric Hellman" <eric@openly.com> wrote:


> so here's a taxonomy for the ways that I've seen put forward for name- uri's
> 
> http
> easiest and most functional, but the minter has to spend a lot of
> money and time getting people to adopt the resulting URIs.
> unfortunate car/document argument that always crops up.

I disagree that lots of money has to be spent, or that lots of time
has to be invested to get folks to use http: URIs. After all, the
most successfully promoted URIs, without question, are http: URIs.

I would argue that the overall cost to managing a namespace based
on http: URIs is comparable to, or even less than for URNs or info:
URIs because the latter will almost surely *still* require web sites
to describe, promote, and document the URIs, in addition to the
infrastructure for managing the non-http:-URI namespace.

> tag
> even easier to mint, no function other than uniqueness. The minter
> has an even bigger hurdle to get the URI  space adopted, due to
> people's unfamiliarity with tag
> 
> urn
> rigorous requirements but the real hurdle with urn is to get IETF
> consensus. IETF lapses most URN proposals and doesn't promote or use
> the ones it does.
> 
> info
> minter has to obtain NISO sign-off. hardly any requirements. no
> function except an unspecified namespace registry.

I expect that a major hurdle to getting tag:, urn:, or info: URIs
widely adopted would be the fact that they are not (easily)
dereferencable to useful representations or descriptions of what
they denote.

There is tremendous utility in being able to obtain information
about the resources denoted by a given URI based on the URI itself
and a well known, proven, globally ubiquitous infrastructure as
close as your favorite browser's address field...

Regards,

Patrick

Received on Wednesday, 8 October 2003 05:18:14 UTC