RE: duri/tdb

Happy new year!

> I'm having a moment of really wanting tdb URIs.  I'm trying
> to organize my notes and realizing about half the time I'm 
> writing a note about a document (web page, web page fragment, 
> technical paper, book) and about half the time I'm writing 
> about the subject of that document.  Ugh.
> 
> But I think I'd be happier with tdb not having dates.  I just want
>    urn:tdb:http://www.w3.org/Consortium
> and when I want to be bound to a date, I can do
>    urn:tdb:urn:duri:2002:http://www.w3.org/Consortium
> 

There are two dates: there is the date of the resource
and separately there is the date of the interpretation
of the description. The date in 'tdb' is more important
for the former than the latter; e.g.,  with a resource like
"data:,the%20president%20of%20the%20united%20states"
you still might mean different things on different dates.

Normally in a literary work in natural language, both
the reference itself as well as the referenced work
are dated, e.g., a footnote in an article written in
1967 might talk about a "private communication" which
itself had a date. With URIs, we want the references to
be able to escape their context while retaining their
meaning, so giving a date in the reference seems natural.

> I understand the feeling of too much float in using tdb
> without a date, but I also want a resolution mechanism, and 
> without a date resolution is easy.

I think the resolution mechanism with the date is just as
easy as the resolution mechanism without the date: just ignore the date
if you want. Yes, the results might be incorrect if you ignore the date,
but no more incorrect than they are if the date is not given.

I could imagine suggesting that the date be omitted
from tdb when it is completely redundant or unnecessary
or when the continuum of interpretation is wanted,
urn:tdb::http://www.w3.org/Consortium.

> I'm also inclined to just step outside of URIs and use some
> notation like *http://www.w3.org/Consortium for 
> urn:tdb:http://www.w3.org/Consortium, since I'm not actually going to
> hand it to anything with the "*" or "urn:tdb" still there.   (the "*"
> is meant in vaguely the same sense as the *-prefix in C.)

It's always possible to use other syntactic notations,
and for any particular purpose, those are likely to
be more concise or appropriate. You choose the 'URI'
notation to fit into a framework that accepts URIs or that otherwise
needs URI extensibility.

Since some applications really wanted URIs for abstractions,
it seemed like 'tdb' was the minimum syntax that would
get what was needed. 'urn:tdb' adds 4 more characters,
but at least puts you on notice that this is no ordinary
URI scheme.

Larry

Received on Wednesday, 1 January 2003 16:00:07 UTC