Re: URIs & Namespaces

hello al.

thanks for your reply. i am not sure i completely understand what you 
are saying, but i do understand that you think that the whole idea of 
placename uris is not a good one.

> For placenames, a URI namespace is a bad idea.
> This is because a namespace among URIs presumes a partition in the
> semantic domains.

yes, and this is what i want. i think that place names are a very common 
concept, but they are also often used in highly contextualized ways, so 
that they only make sense to specific user groups. and that's fine, i 
just want to have a universal way how this can be expressed.

> This is what is right about RDF: it takes a graph.

this debate in the place name application area could probably completely 
mirror the debate in the microformats vs. rdf field. by which i mean: do 
you favor an approach with disconnected islands of semantics, or do you 
envision a complete description framework in which everything can be 
connected and maybe will be connected, at least ideally.

i don't want to get into that debate here, but i am definitely more on 
the microformat side, for technical and for philosophical reasons, so i 
have no problem if descriptions cannot be fully connected.

> The schema of schemas is a graph, and so it takes a graph-mungeing
> calculus to manage metadata.

yes. iff you choose to favor the rdf world-view.

> Then use the concept variously termed
> - localized name -- in desktop APIs
> - label - in SKOS and ISO/IEC 24752-5
> to link these interoperable data with the colloquial placenames.

we are actually working on this. we have a description language for 
place name vocabularies, which describes how place names map to 
wgs84-based geographic descriptions. but this (a) can be replaced by 
something else if people want to describe their place names in a 
different way, or it (b) can be ignored if people don't want to describe 
the place names beyond assigning names to places that are meaningful to 
them. so my goal is to be able to name and identify a place that is 
meaningful to a group of users and/or applications. whether my specific 
approach of supporting namespaces is a good one, is something i am not 
really sure about, but apart from that question, i am still wondering 
whether there is some general rule of how the namespace question should 
be handled in a uri scheme.

thanks and kind regards,

erik wilde   tel:+1-510-6432253 - fax:+1-510-6425814
        dret@berkeley.edu  -  http://dret.net/netdret
        UC Berkeley - School of Information (ISchool)

Received on Saturday, 8 December 2007 20:13:02 UTC