Re: Real data

Quoting Eric Jain <Eric.Jain@isb-sib.ch>:

> The problem is that I can't guarantee that anything will ever be 
> directly resolvable in a stable way,

You can never give a 100% guarantee to that anyway, and user-agents have to
cope. I say go with the HTTP URIs.

> Another issue is that we reference a lot of data in other databases. 
> Virtually none of these databases have stable URLs for accessing their 
> resources (/cgi-bin/ etc). We therefore keep a list that allows us to 
> map identifiers for a given database to the address-of-the-day.

You can provide a stable HTTP URI that you use in your RDF and which when
dereferenced redirects to whatever the external source is currently using to
identify the resource. You could even redirect or provide a representation
yourself depending on what sort of representations is accepted by the
user-agent.

-- 
Jon Hanna
<http://www.hackcraft.net/>
"…if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's probably not a 
ConceptualWork about a duck." - Mark Baker

Received on Thursday, 22 July 2004 07:18:08 UTC