- From: Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org>
- Date: Sun, 07 Apr 2002 13:19:08 -0400
- To: Uche Ogbuji <uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com>
- Cc: www-rdf-interest@w3.org
> My only comment is that I do hope we can find our way to banishing the odd use > of URI fragments in RDF except as needed to denote in-line resources attached > to a particular serialization document. > > I, for one, do not use URI fragments in my vocabularies, and at Fourthought, > we consider it "best practice" not to do so. > > Let's keep serialization issues out of the idea of universal identification, > where possible. Interesting. I've been thinking I need to write a "Why Hash? (Why Use URI-References as RDF Identifiers)" paper. I'll try out the argument now. I think any string which wont be accidentally reused makes a decent universal identifier. UUIDs/GUIDs/tags, are fine for this. Unfortunately, they don't help us locate any information about the things identified. It would be very nice to use RDF identifiers kind of like web address: you see one on the side of a bus, you type it in, and you get some interesting information. For this to work with UUIDs, we'd need something like google in the background. Seems like a bad idea. The URI-Reference approach (which I've adopted, after flirting with tag URIs) is to use URI-References as object identifiers, and URIs as knowledge-base identifiers. Doing a GET on the URI contained in a URI-Reference gives you the owner's information about the thing denoted by the URI-Reference. The acceptable content types in the GET will guide the server to providing the information in text/html, application/rdf+xml, or other formal or informal knowledge representation languages. You may have many other sources of information, of course, and the owner may not provide any information, but you at least have one place to start. A nearby approach, which I don't like, is to use URIs to denote everything. With this plan, the owner has the same ability to publish easily-found information, but the whole system seems more confusing. Now we're back to wondering what exactly http://www.w3.org/ denotes. With the previous plan it's clear: it denote a collection of information (published by the W3C, probably about the W3C and other things). If you use URIs for everything, you're essentially running a great risk of accidental identifier re-use. -- sandro
Received on Sunday, 7 April 2002 13:21:01 UTC