Re: URI registries and schemes

Erik Wilde asks:

> could you please point out a "uri scheme" that has been 
> deployed this way (well-defined semantics bound to uris made 
> available on specific http servers with well-defined dns names 
> and some well-defined pattern to the uri's paths)

What about slurls, which provide http URIs for locations in Second Life? 
See [1] for general information and [2] to play around building your own 
slurls.  The general form of a slurl is:

 
http://slurl.com/secondlife/<region>/<x-coordinate>/<y-coordinate>/<z-coordinate>/ 


Try making one and putting it into your ordinary Web browser.  Something 
useful will happen (for some definition of useful).  I'm 95% sure that 
software that knows about slurls can use a particular slurl to navigate in 
Second Life without openning any http connections.  This is exactly what I 
was advocating in my earlier email [3].

It may also be of some use to consult the TAG Finding on Metadata in URIs. 
[4]  Among other things, it says:

"Constraint: Web software MUST NOT depend on the correctness of metadata 
inferred from a URI, except when the encoding of such metadata is 
documented by applicable standards and specifications.

"Such standards and specifications include pertinent Web and Internet RFCs 
and Recommendations such as [URI], as >>well as documentation provided by 
the URI assignment authority<<."

In this case, slurl.com is the pertinent URI assignment authority, and 
they have provided documentation of the mapping from URI path segments to 
positions in Second Life space. 

Eric Wilde wrote (in an earlier note) [5]:

> that somehow only works for pretty heavyweight place namespaces

I think slurls show how this approach can be practical for spaces with 
very fine grain.  Of course, the administrative domain slurl.com is a 
relatively heavyweight construct, but it's being applied to identification 
of positions in Second Life space with extremely fine resolution.

Noah

[1] http://slurl.com/
[2] http://slurl.com/build.php
[3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/uri/2007Dec/0028.html
[4] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/metaDataInURI-31.html
[5] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/uri/2007Dec/0029.html

--------------------------------------
Noah Mendelsohn 
IBM Corporation
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
1-617-693-4036
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Received on Wednesday, 12 December 2007 22:59:28 UTC