RE: Which URI should be persistent when redirects are used?

I know some of you don't like the notion of XRI (eXtensible Resource
Identifer - an evolving OASIS spec), but I think it's got a nice feature
in that when you resolve an XRI you get back an XRDS (XRI Resource
Descriptor Sequence - a structured XML document) that describes the
named resource. The XRDS includes Service End Points (perhaps many)
describing how to interact with the named resource. This approach helps
others to use the identifier the way you intend it to be used.

Marty.Schleiff@boeing.com; CISSP
Associate Technical Fellow - Cyber Identity Specialist
Computing Security Infrastructure
(206) 679-5933

-----Original Message-----
From: Pat Hayes [mailto:phayes@ihmc.us] 
Sent: Thursday, September 27, 2007 12:43 PM
To: Misha Wolf
Cc: www-tag@w3.org
Subject: RE: Which URI should be persistent when redirects are used?


>OK.  The story is ...
>
>The IPTC is likely to approve the NewsML-G2 specification at our 
>meeting in Prague in mid-October.
>
>We use URIs to denote concepts associated with the News Object (as 
>values of Subject, Genre, Creator, Title, Publisher, etc).  We want 
>these URIs to be invariant and to participate fully in the Semantic 
>Web.

The key question, seems to me, is: who has the responsibility for
creating these URIs and assigning them their meanings? Who 'owns' 
them? Because that agency has quite a task: it has to somehow tell the
world, unambiguously, what exactly it is that these URIs denote. 
When that denoted thing can't be accessed by a Web server of some kind,
that is quite a task. Does anyone have any idea how to do it? 
Suppose for example I am given the task of telling everyone that some
URI, say http://myexample.notarealone/Jazz-X , is intended by me to
denote Jazz. Well, I can say that, but what does it mean? What is Jazz
exactly? Is it the totality of all jazz recordings? The boundaries of
this set are not well-defined, but perhaps that does not matter (though
I suspect it will); but maybe Jazz isn't such a neatly defined thing as
a set in any case. How do I explain what Jazz is well enough so that
others can use this URI in the way I intend?

Put the same point another way: how will anyone even know whether or not
URI-X is invariant? I might say that my URI-X denotes Jazz and have one
thing in mind, but if 99% of the people who use my URI in fact use it
with a somewhat different notion of Jazz in mind, then that's what it
will in fact denote when used on the Web, independently of my
intentions. So, did the denotation change? Was the URI invariant?

Pat

Received on Thursday, 27 September 2007 19:59:54 UTC