location vs. map scheme

hello noah.

> I'd put it a bit differently.  Google has registered google.com, and 
> Linden Research has registered slurl.com.  That gives each of them the 
> right to associate resources with http-scheme URIs for those domains, 
> respectively.  So, if Google says that all URIs conforming to the template 
> http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=<lat>,<long> refer to the corresponding 
> places on the physical earth, then they do.  If Google says that they 
> refer to a set of Google map documents that happen to depict those places 
> on the earth, then that's what they identify.  I suspect that for Google, 
> it's the latter (to the extent they've been careful in documenting one or 
> the other.)  The URIs don't really directly identify the place:  they 
> identify Google maps of the places.

and i think this also is the point where it becomes clear that locations 
and mapping services are two different things. apart from the location 
coordinates, google has various parameters for the zoom factor and 
various other features of its mapping services. other mapping services 
have other features, and allow these to control via query parameter as 
well. that is good because it allows bookmarks which really identify a 
"view", not just the location.

so, ideally, location uris would be one thing, map uris another, and 
while for map uris i think a http-based scheme is a good solution 
(because the maps are mostly delivered over http anyway), the same is 
not automatically true for locations. of course, in many cases location 
uris will be mapped to map uris, but that is just one operation that can 
be performed on them.

cheers,

dret.

Received on Monday, 17 December 2007 22:23:05 UTC