Re: Editor's Draft of ISSUE-57 URI Usage Primer

Hi Noah,

On Tue, 2012-10-09 at 03:15 -0400, Noah Mendelsohn wrote:
>  . . .  Speaking for myself, not the TAG as a whole: 
> it never occurred to me that the usage primer would be taken to discourage 
> the "minting" separate URIs for landing page and subject. I assume everyone 
> involved thinks thats architecturally preferable when practicle.
> 
> I read the primer as providing useful advice for the many situations in 
> which, for good or bad reasons, such separate URIs are not created.

I think it's important to distinguish between different roles in the URI
lifecycle:

 - For an RDF *author* -- i.e., someone/something writing and publishing
RDF -- the author has the choice of making the distinction between the
landing page and its subject.  If he/she chooses to make this
distinction, then he/she can further choose how to do so, and two of the
options would be: (a) to mint separate URIs for them; or (b) to use the
punning properties technique described in
http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/uri-usage-primer-2012-10-03/

 - For an RDF *consumer* -- i.e., someone/something that reads RDF --
the consumer has no choice about whether the RDF that was received makes
the landing-page-versus-its-subject distinction: it either does or it
doesn't.  So AFAICT, the punning properties technique is not intended
for this case.  In this case what's needed is an after-the-fact way of
"splitting" the resource identity, as described (sketchily) here:
http://dbooth.org/2007/splitting/ 

So it seems to me that the situation in which the punning-properties
approach would be applicable -- the RDF authoring situation -- is a
situation in which the author probably would have the choice of using
that approach or minting separate URIs.


-- 
David Booth, Ph.D.
http://dbooth.org/

Opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect those of his employer.

Received on Tuesday, 9 October 2012 17:09:34 UTC