Re: Human-Opaque URIs

Hi Steve, Hi RDF Interest,

(this is a reply to a old mail)

Steve Harris writes:
 > 
 > On Fri, Apr 02, 2004 at 09:57:53 +0100, Phil Dawes wrote:
 > > 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?
 > 
 > We do this a lot (for the reasons you mention), both with a process that
 > generates a stream of unique numbers and by hashing some existing unique
 > (but recognisable) ID, as appropriate.
 > 

Do you use any opaque URIs for properties and classes?

The reason I ask is because I'm currently re-writing veudas (web rdf
editor) to generate unique uris using a hashing scheme - this is
useful because it allieviates the user from having to think about
RDF/URIs when creating new resource data (which is a good thing
because I want it to be used by non-rdf-savvy users).

Currently I'm steering away from this mechanism for creating
properties, since it makes rdf queries completely unreadable and
hand-writing rdql virtually impossible.

But the advantages are so compelling to me that I'm wondering if
opaque uris are the way forward for classes/properties too. Maybe
developers could use a gui tool to generate their queries (including
comments) before cut-n-pasting into code?

Anyway - I'd be interested to hear of any experiences/thoughts you
might have in this area.

Many thanks,

Phil

Received on Monday, 7 June 2004 15:20:25 UTC