Re: Human-Opaque URIs

An auxiliary question to Phil's - are dates in URIs actually useful?

(beyond reducing the number of files in a directory ;-)

Phil Dawes wrote:

>Hi All,
>
>We've been using meaningfully-named URIs at work for a while, and
>after 9 months I'm finding them difficult to keep totally persistent.
>
>E.g. we store an inventory of applications, but every so often the
>name of an application changes, and when it does the old URI doesn't
>make sense any more. People (or rather automated RDF generation
>systems) start using new URIs to represent the same thing, and it all
>starts to decay a little. OWL should be able to take care of this, but
>currently none of our systems have OWL inference engines.
>
>The main problem isn't with the URIs themselves, but with the fact
>that we've got into the habit of expecting to be able to read them
>ourselves. When the URI text doesn't correspond to the 'thing'
>anymore, it niggles.
>
>I'm now considering using opaque numbers in URIs to represent things -
>e.g. http://sw.example.com/2003/01/application/23 - and am wondering if
>other people do this and what their experiences are.
>In particular, what would be the advantages/disadvantages of working
>in a world where URIs contain little human-readable information?
>
>Cheers,
>
>Phil
>
>
>
>  
>


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Received on Saturday, 3 April 2004 18:24:52 UTC