RE: Bitzi File Metadata RDF Dump

[Ever-increasing CC: list snipped]
> From: Dan Brickley [mailto:danbri@w3.org]
> The Bitzi bitprint property looks like an incredibly useful 
> one. But the
> thing is to *use* it, not get distracted by premature 
> standardisation. If
> it turns out to be as useful as we hope, then doubtless various
> organisations will sing its praises (in prose and in RDF). But
> committee-style endorsement should follow rather than preceed use,
> experimentation and deployment. IMHO much of the RDF design 
> is informed by
> this (perhaps unarticulated) attitude, and it is one of the 
> technology's characteristic strengths.

How does one deal with the situation during and after standardisation, where
this incredibly useful property's URI changes?  By definition, if it is
incredibly useful, it will have been incredibly used; therefore, any change
to its URI will impact many systems.  Unless one can define some form of
bidirectional equivalence, mass prefix changes will cause grief to
developers and users for years afterwards.

This doesn't just impact bitprints.  I wonder how many otherwise-useful RDF
vocabularies will suffer link-rot if they use URLs rather than URIs*.  Error
404 is both the Web's greatest strength --- allowing distributed authoring
--- and its greatest weakness.

		- Peter

* Both used in this email according to the 'contemporary' view in [1].

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/NOTE-uri-clarification-20010921/
--
Peter Crowther, VP Development, Network Inference Limited

Received on Wednesday, 26 September 2001 12:50:08 UTC