On 3/13/2012 4:45 PM, John F. Sowa wrote:
> I agree. But many people have been told that URIs will solve their
> problems. I just wanted to point out that the problems require much
> more analysis and more detailed conventions than just using URIs. (01)
I doubt many people have been that 'URIs will solve their problems' in
the sense implied by John's statement. What they've likely been told is
that, compared to other identification mechanisms, HTTP URIs have very
nice characteristics and so are a good choice in many scenarios: (02)
1 - HTTP access
2 - globally unique
3 - already in use and relatively well-understood (companies Web pages,
XML/namespaces, etc.)
4 - not industry- or organization- or country-specific
5 - easily reused across industries, organizations and countries (03)
and therefore a good *URI strategy* can solve a lot of data federation
problems because you get it more or less 'for free' when using languages
such as RDF/OWL. The point is only that it *does* solve some problems
that other identification mechanisms do not. For example, if the ISO
committee responsible for quantities and measures would publish *the*
URI for 'kilogram' then everyone else on the planet could use it, or at
least map to it, quite easily and guarantee complete interoperability
wrt that concept. Of course, there's analysis work to do wrt what the
interesting concepts are ... but then that's obvious, isn't it? (04)
Cheers,
David (05)
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UK +44 7788 561308
US +1 336-283-0606 (06)
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