Re: What is at the end of the namespace?

> Are http URI's required for names spaces? [sic]

According to the XML Namespace specification [1], any URI-Reference
can be used for namespaces. It was later decided that relative
URI-References for namespaces should be deprecated [2].

> Could I use fpi:... to identify a name space if I wanted to?

I am not familiar with the "fpi:" URI scheme, and a cursory glance at
the list of URI schemes [3] confirms that this is most likely an
unregistered scheme. If it alludes to Formal Public Identifiers, then
I very much doubt that these could ever be used in URI space, since
there is no way of registering them, and use is by consensus only.

> What we need is a guid scheme.  That way I can identify my
> name space as
>
> guid:E30A0ACA5D32ED4C52E0D20381D5AEF7
>
> A guid scheme would probably be useful for all sorts of other
things.

A GUID scheme (there is actually a UUID URN namespace: "urn:uuid:") is
one possible option, but one of the advantages of (for example) the
TAG URI scheme over UUIDs is that they are human readable, which is
useful:-

[[[
   UUIDs [UUID, ISO11578] are hard for humans to read.
]]] -
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-kindberg-tag-uri-01.txt

This is useful at this point in the Semantic Web because in my
experience, one very often has to remember the most generally used
"namespaces", RDF, RDFS, DC, FOAF, DAML, etc.

Cheers,

[1] "An XML namespace is a collection of names, identified by a URI
reference [...]" - http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xml-uri/2000Sep/0083
[3] http://www.w3.org/Addressing/schemes

--
Kindest Regards,
Sean B. Palmer
@prefix : <http://webns.net/roughterms/> .
:Sean :hasHomepage <http://purl.org/net/sbp/> .

Received on Wednesday, 7 November 2001 16:51:43 UTC