RE: URI registries and schemes

noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com 
> 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.
>
> Slurl.com says that URLs of the form
> http://slurl.com/secondlife/<region>/<x-coordinate>/<y-coord
> inate>/<z-coordinate>/
> "provides direct teleport links to locations in Second Life". 
>  That's a bit informal, but it suggests to me that these 
> links are documented by the responsible authority as 
> referring not to a page or a document, but to a position in 
> Second Life.  So, I think that's the difference.

Thanks Noah for your comments.  

> BTW: there's a closely related discussion on the TAG mailing 
> list which has to do with a related question: there's no 
> question that if your URI identifies a document such as a 
> map, an HTTP status code 200 is appropriate -- the question 
> is, if your URI identifies something else, like a physical 
> place or a person, is 200 still appropriate.  The TAG decided 
> some time ago that the answer is "no", but the ramifications 
> are still being (hotly) debated.  I strongly suggest we not 
> run that debate in parallel here, but if you're interested 
> (and have a few days free), you might want to go back through 
> the archives of www-tag@w3.org.  Thanks!

I have actually read most of those discussions on the TAG list, and my
comments to which you replied were actually in reference to those TAG email
discussions although you, as usual, did a much more eloquent job of
explaining it than me.  :)

However, I was never able to actually find a definititive statement of TAGs
position on an HTTP URL identifying a physical place or person.  Can you
impose on you to give me your best synopsis and/or a URL to the most
representative email on the mailing list?  Thanks in advance.

What I think Erik was debating with me was whether or not an HTTP URL could
actually identify the location vs. just a web page. My thoughts were that
Google.com isn't in the position to provide the definitive URL for any given
place because what about Yahoo, MSN, and MapQuest?  On the other hand my
thoughts are that a hypothetical "location.org" could provide that
definitive URL assuming enough of the right people aggreed to it and an
appropriate persistence strategy were put into place. (BTW, notice I didn't
use the word 'magic' in the 'location.org' domain name... :-) 

That said, I'd really like to get your thoughts on the matter because I've
definitely admired your recent work on metaDataInURI-31 and respect your
reasoned approach. Is it appropriate to use an URI, in this case an HTTP
URL, to identify a place and have that same HTTP URL return an HTML
representation of information about that place?  For example, can the
following URL represent *both* a location in Atlanta, Georgia USA *and* the
web page that returns structured information about that location?

	http://location.org/33.743184,-84.392853

If the answer is 'no', and I hope you can give some justification so I can
learn from your rationale, then would it not make sense based that the
following *could* be the URI which identifies that location (based on my
take-aways from past readings of the various TAG discussions on HTTP URLs
and identity and URI use in RDF):

	http://location.org/33.743184,-84.392853#id

Thanks in advance.

-- 
-Mike Schinkel
http://www.mikeschinkel.com/blogs/
http://www.welldesignedurls.org
http://atlanta-web.org

Received on Tuesday, 18 December 2007 01:17:31 UTC