Re: location vs. map scheme

hello noah.

noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com wrote:
> Yes.  Of course, people refer to things indirectly all the time.  As long 
> as we know when it is and isn't happening, that's OK. [...] Where we 
> need to be careful is when we say that 
> http://www.amazon.com/Weaving-Web-Original-Ultimate-Destiny/dp/006251587X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1197930771&sr=8-1 
> was published last month, and especially if we're doing it in an automated 
> system where there's no human available to notice the ambiguity.

this is how i got started with all of that. my hypothesis is that 
location already is and increasingly will become one of the concepts on 
the web which no longer should be represented in ways (such as google 
maps uris) which are mainly useful for humans. and if we want to move 
locations more into the realm of a useful first-level datatype (in the 
same sense as the mailto: uri scheme that it is useful to be able to 
identify email addresses in a machine-understandable way), then a uri 
scheme would be a way to go.

i do see that for your example, even though urn:isbn:006251587X would be 
more accurate in terms of "the best uri", it would be less useful for me 
as a human because my browser does not recognize that uri. and if it 
did, it would probably have all kinds of "helpful widgets" from 
booksellers trying to get into the configuration to be registered as the 
handler for that. a bit like all those programs trying to capture as 
many media types as possible upon installation.

i think that now is a good time to think about whether the web should 
embrace location as a first-level concept, or whether it should stay 
location-agnostic and let applications and services sort things out. the 
iphone with some built-in code for recognizing map uris and handing them 
over to the built-in map application is a good indication of things to 
come, and i think there should be a better way for doing this.

cheers,

dret.

Received on Monday, 17 December 2007 23:31:22 UTC