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
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