Richard,
I pretty much agree with all you say here.
However, I've always been a little unconvinced by the 'Cool URIs don't
change' piece (http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI) linked to by the
W3C Note you referenced. While I agree with the sentiment, I think the
W3C statement does not quite gel with my practical experience.
Essentially, the W3C seem to assume that all web-managers are masters
of their own destiny and have complete power within their
organisation. I vividly recall the pain that my local web manager
experienced when the university I worked for (North London) merged
with another (London Guildhall) to form a third (LondonMet). We did a
lot amount of planning around this in terms of the eventual website
and web-applications, but we broke and changed a fair few URLs along
the way, despite making full use of all kinds of tricks to manage this
(redirects, URL re-writing etc.).
The gluing together of the object identifier with the organisational
domain part of a URL is seen by some as a potential problem, and is
addressed for example in John Kunze's paper on ARK (http://colab.mpdl.mpg.de/mediawiki/images/e/eb/ESci08_Sem_1_n2t_a_viable_pid_solution_Kunze.pdf
)
The W3C would maintain that this is unnecessary. I tend to lean
towards the W3C in this respect - but really because I think the
deleterious effect of changing URIs can be overstated, so it's not
necessarily worth introducing another layer of complexity.
On a separate note - my point about open-source was with regard to
aggregator-based services in response to Jeremy's suggestion, rather
than a recommendation for individual museums.
Cheers,
Paul
On 4 Jun 2008, at 13:34, Richard Light wrote:
> In message <[log in to unmask]>, Paul
> Walk <[log in to unmask]> writes
>
>> My point about the risk in the wait for persistent identifiers
>> delaying the linking of open data was aimed more at the risk
>> associated with waiting for a central authority to introduce
>> mechanisms for taking care of this on behalf of museums.
>
> I really think it's up to museums themselves to tackle this issue.
> What would the "central authority" do for them? In my view, this
> W3C Note sums up nicely what needs to be done:
>
> http://www.w3.org/TR/cooluris/
>
> Museums certainly shouldn't be doing "Semantic Web" differently from
> other participants.
>
>> I believe we should be encouraging, supporting, cajoling, helping
>> museums get into a position where they can mint their own
>> authoritative and unique identifiers. URLs fit these two criteria.
>
> Given that any museum worthy of Registration will already have
> unique internal identifiers for every object in its collection, I
> see only two issues to be addressed:
>
> 1. the provision of a domain name as an "address space" within which
> the object URIs will live
>
> 2. possible mapping of the syntax of internal identifiers to a more
> URL-friendly format. You don't want lots of %XX URLencoding in your
> identifiers
>
> Others may disagree that it's that simple ...
>
> After that, it's a purely technical matter how you deliver these
> URIs on the web. While I take your point about using Open Source
> components to do this, I still think it will be easier for many
> museums to have this provided as an add-on to their collections
> database, not least because that means that the RDF descriptions are
> automatically kept up to date, and don't require a separate
> synchronisation process.
>
>> Perhaps persistence is a related, but separate issue?
>
> I think it's part of the basic deal: see Section 4.5 of the above
> Note.
>
> Richard
>
> --
> Richard Light
> XML/XSLT and Museum Information Consultancy
> [log in to unmask]
>
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Technical Manager
UKOLN (University of Bath)
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/
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