[PRISM] Change due to unregistered URIs

Hi all,

I have started taking care of all the comments to have
come in on the PRISM spec in the last month. First of all,
thanks to everyone for their review. A variety of issues
were raised and errors caught. Thanks very much for doing so.

By far the most frequent comment was the request to NOT use
unregistered URI schemes in the examples. The PRISM WG talked
about this at their last face-to-face meeting. There seem to be
two choices. One is to uniformly use something like
http://prismstandard.org/ as the start of the various URIs for
items in controlled vocabularies like ISO 3166, SIC, NAICS, etc.

The other is to find the real URL that is closest to being resolvable
to the item. In some cases, such URLs exist. For example, for the
SIC (Standard Industry Codes) vocabulary, a code like 0132 (Tobacco)
can be found at http://www.osha.gov/cgi-bin/sic/sicser2?0132. However,
OSHA is not actually the portion of the Department of Labor that
defined SIC. And of course, for most schemes there are no little
URL queries that fetch the definition of a controlled vocabulary
entry. The group's concern is that using such URIs would be more
confusing to readers than the ones using prismstandard.org. For
that reason we are planning to update the spec along those lines.
But we wanted to offer this group the chance to comment on that
proposed solution. Does it sound OK to you?

Best regards,
Ron Daniel Jr.
Standards Architect
Tel: +1 415 778 3113
Fax: +1 415 220 3131
Email: rdaniel@interwoven.com 

Visit www.interwoven.com
Moving Business to the Web



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Aaron Swartz [mailto:aswartz@swartzfam.com]
> Sent: Sunday, March 11, 2001 2:21 PM
> To: rdaniel@interwoven.com; 'Dan Connolly';
> spec-comments@prismstandard.org
> Cc: www-rdf-interest@w3.org
> Subject: Re: quick review of the PRISM spec
> 
> 
> First, thanks to Ron for getting me an HTML copy of the spec.
> 
> Ron Daniel <rdaniel@interwoven.com> wrote:
> 
> >> * <dc:coverage rdf:resource="iso3166-2:gr" />
> >> er... the iso3166-2 URI scheme is new to me; are you registering
> >> it?
> > Nope, that would be for ISO to register.
> >> * <dc:identifier rdf:resource="wanderlust:2357845" />
> >> whoa! don't give folks the impression they can create their own
> >> URI schemes just like that.
> > I am happy to change this to something else.
> >> * <dc:subject rdf:resource="NAICS:21"/>
> >> more unregistered URI schemes?
> > Yup. That one is for NAFTA's industry classification scheme
> > known as NAICS - North American Industrial Classification System.
> 
> I think Dan, Tim, I and a bunch of other people would be glad 
> if you got
> these URI schemes out of the spec.
> 
> > But a lightweight procedure for registering URI schemes 
> would be nice.
> 
> No, it wouldn't creating new, unnecessary URI schemes is 
> generally a bad
> idea. They can almost always be fitted into some sort of 
> existing scheme
> just fine, whether it's by a URL, or, if you're desperate, 
> some sort of URN.
> 
> >> * xmlns:prism="http://prismstandard.org/namespaces/1.0/basic/"
> >> I recommend "...basic#" rather than "...basic/", because 
> "...basic/"
> >> necessarily
> >> denotes an HTTP resource, i.e. a sort of generic document
> >> (i.e. a thing
> >> that responds to GET requests), but RDF properties and classes
> >> might turn out to be disjoint from HTTP resources.
> >> "...basic#foo" isn't
> >> constrained the way "...basic/foo" is. (@@does this make any sense?
> >> Ask TimBL about it if you get a chance.)
> > Yes, it does make some sense. But basic#foo is constrained in
> > other ways. You have to fetch all of basic and then dig through
> > it for #foo. The PRISM namespaces are small enough that would not
> > be a big filesize problem (unlike the LCSH case), but the only
> > format that has fragment identifiers defined for it right now
> > is HTML. So, one way or the other we are implicitly saying something
> > about the resource - that it is an HTTP resource or that the thing
> > is a part of an HTML file. Both suck, but I think the HTTP
> > thing sucks less. I am open to argument on this issue, however.
> 
> Actually, that's not true. XPointer is in Last Call:
> 
> http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr
> 
> and the so-called "bare name" syntax is practically 
> guaranteed to sustain
> any future drafts, as well as expected to be added to just 
> about every other
> MIME type. Anyway, I don't know how important this is, but I wanted to
> correct you.
> 
> However, I do think it would be rather useful to get 
> something at those
> namespace URIs. RDDL will do just fine, and it has fragment 
> identifiers
> defined (both by XPointer and by HTML!).
> 
> A typo:
> > which then contains one of RDF's collection constructs, 
> such as dc:Seq.
> 
> I think you mean rdf:Seq.
> 
> I'd also appreciate seeing RSS in the "Relationship to Other 
> Specs" section.
> 
> It looks pretty good, although it might be useful to break 
> the normative and
> non-normative parts into two separate documents to make it shorter.
> -- 
> [ Aaron Swartz | me@aaronsw.com | http://www.aaronsw.com ]
>

Received on Thursday, 29 March 2001 17:03:08 UTC