RE: ungetable http URIs

Hi Andy, David

> I hope that we do plane to place information at the URLs so there is
> something GETtable, especially if the URI is a namespace in which case
> placing the vocabulary at that place would be good.
> 
> One of the reasons I have been advocating placing our 
> namespaces in our web
> palce is so we can place useful information at these points (the other
> reason is that we should presume on other people's web space).

In the Artstor dataset at least we are also currently using URLs for a 
number of things:

1. vocabularies
2. controlled terms
3. metadata instances

I think its helpful to distinguish between each of these?

So with 1 we should definitely be using URLs as Andy notes above BUT at the
moment we haven't put anything at that namespace. I should be able to fix
that fairly easily. 

For 2 and 3 it is less clear, and I am open for guidance from the team here?

Currently I think we have a number of viewpoints?

David:

> If we don't ever plan for the URIs to be http-GETtable, 
> there's no reason for us to use http URIs: we could do 
> urn://www.mit.edu/simile....  This would avoid browsers 
> getting confused.  Alternatively (and this is the approach
> I'd like to  see) it would be nice if we had a web server that
> returned some useful RDF when we tried to resolve such URIs---just in
> case the requestor was able to cope with that (as haystack can)

I think Stefano argued even more strongly for the second approach:

> there is a general tendency in the XML world to stay away from URIs 
> that are no "potentially dereferencable". I made the mistake of 
> creating my URI scheme in the past and, as TBL  suggested, URN are 
> poor substitutes for dereferencable URI because any lookup and 
> discovery mechanism would be a poor mimic of HTTP anyway.
> Keep in mind that the difference between
>  urn:isbn:0465026567
>  http://www.iso.org/ISBN/0465026567
> even if treated as URI, is that 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.

how do we reach consensus?

thanks

Dr Mark H. Butler
Research Scientist                HP Labs Bristol
mark-h_butler@hp.com
Internet: http://www-uk.hpl.hp.com/people/marbut/

Received on Wednesday, 19 November 2003 07:37:44 UTC