Re: Best practices using URIs

On Thu, 13 Nov 2003, Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:

>   urn:isbn:0465026567
>   http://www.iso.org/ISBN/0465026567
>
> even if treated as URI, ... the second *could* be used as a URL to
> lookup and discovery information on that particular resource, while the
> first does *NOT* include a methodology to do the above and it's left as
> application dependent.

Over and over I have seen RDF with "http:" URLs, and it is extremely rare
for such URLs to resolvable to anything besides '404 Document not found'.
The second URL you provide continues this trend.  This may be a losing
battle, but it seems easier to design applications where the vast majority
of URIs were not resolvable, but the occasional one was. It would be in
this case that your application could know it was appropriate to go out on
to the internet for more information.

If you are creating a URI for a book, such as "urn:isbn:0465026567" it
only takes one more statement to give a resolvable location for that item.
For example:

urn:isbn:0465026567 :pdfVersionAt http://myserver.mydomain/...

Most of the other metadata associated with the item, such as its title,
page count, authors, etc. are in no way dependent on the fact that a
version can be downloaded from a particular server at the moment.  If, in
the future, that version cannot be retrieved, the single statement can be
removed, leaving the rest of the metadata intact.

Nick Matsakis

Received on Thursday, 13 November 2003 09:59:33 UTC