Re: CURIEs: A proposal

On Jun 13, 2006, at 12:01 PM, Misha Wolf wrote:
> Hi Dan,
>
> Various groups are interested in the CURIE initiative. These groups
> don't all have the same requirements. I hope that we can agree on a
> good solution, which meets all of the requirements. During our
> post-presentation discussion in Edinburgh, we discussed specifically
> the IPTC's requirements. The mail you responded to below was my
> attempted synthesis, which tackles a broader canvas than just the
> IPTC's needs.

I'm a little in the dark... if I knew what the other groups are 
involved and
what their requirements are, I'd be in a better position to evaluate
the proposal... and in a better position to know if a critical mass
of the relevant constituents agree.


>  I've summarised some of the options for the IPTC's
> problem space, and some of the problems with those options, in my
> reply to Henry:
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2006Jun/0046.html
>
> I'll respond now to specific points in your mail:
>
>> As I understand it, IPTC has a whole bunch of codes... collections
>> of codes, in fact. Vocabularies, I gather.
>
> Indeed.  Note that many of these vocabularies exist independently of
> the IPTC, eg:
> -  BCP-47 (eg "zh-Hant", ie Traditional Chinese)
> -  CUSIP (eg "037833100", ie Apple Computer)
> -  ISBN (eg "0-321-18578-1", ie The Unicode Standard, Version 4.0)
> -  ISIN (eg "US0378331005", ie Apple Computer)
> -  ISO-3166-Alpha-2 (eg "CS", ie Serbia and Montenegro)
> -  ISO-4217-Alpha (eg "JPY", ie Japanese Yen)
> -  ISO-4217-Num (eg "392", ie Japanese Yen)
> -  ISSN (eg "0261-3077", ie The Guardian)
> -  NYSE (eg "A", ie Agilent Technologies)
> -  SEDOL (eg "0263494", ie BAE Systems)
> -  Valoren (eg "1203203", ie UBS)
>
>> The goal is a compact syntax to encode a code within a vocabulary,
>> such that you can get from this compact syntax a URI for the code
>> within the vocabulary and for the vocabulary itself.
>
> And to ensure that receiving systems and people receive codes which
> they understand.

Can we expect receving systems/people to learn about whatever
proposal we come up with? Or do they have to understand based
on what they already know, without any code changes for systems
and without people reading more specs (or other docs)?

If we can't expect systems to pick up new technology, that's
sort of a non-starter, no?

[...]
>> Option C: Like A, but for any codes that don't start with an XML name
>> start character, put a _ in front of it before you use it in any of
>> these
>> web technolgies. So sic:_0070 is the short syntax,
>> http://sic.org/vocab1#_0070
>> is the URI for the code, and again, to get the URI for the vocab,
>> strip off the fragment: http://sic.org/vocab1 .
>> Now we can use the short syntax as a QName in RDF/XML.
>
> We can't do this as receiving systems (and people) would not
> recognise the codes.

Receiving systems can execute the algorithm and determine
the relevant URIs and then look up the URIs in the Web, no?

>> In Option C, the IATA stuff is the same as in Option A:
>> bind iata: to http://iata.org/airports# and
>> let iata:LGA expand to http://iata.org/airports#LGA
>> and strip off the fragment to get the vocabulary and get
>> http://iata.org/airports .
>>
>>
>> There might have been some other options that I've forgotten.
>
> The option I favour is:
>   vocabIRI          = http://sic.org/vocab1
>   prefix            = sic
>   suffix (aka code) = 0070
>   CURIE             = sic:0070
>   construction rule = <vocabIRI> & "#_" & <code>
>   codeIRI           = http://sic.org/vocab1#_0070

That looks reasonable as far as I can tell.


>> And I'm not sure to what extent compatibility with existing NewsML
>> practice is a requirement.
>
> It isn't.

Good to know.

>   But compatibility with the real world *is* a requirement.

I don't know what to make of that remark.

>> The proposal you make here seems much more complicated
>> than any of those options, and it involves a lot more coordination
>> (new rules that bindin on "Groups within the W3C and elsewhere").
>
> See my intro.
>
> Regards,
> Misha
> ------------------- NewsML 2 resources ------------------------------
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-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Tuesday, 13 June 2006 20:13:32 UTC