On Aug 18, 2008, at 11:17 AM, Mikael Nilsson wrote:
> On mån, 2008-08-18 at 10:58 -0700, Karen Coyle wrote:
>>
>> Tony, I don't think that the issue is that URIs are hard for
>> humans to
>> read -- actually, humans shouldn't have to read them. I think the
>> issue
>> is that until we have some standard resolution for our URIs there
>> isn't
>> much we can do with them. A URI on its own is just a dumb identifier.
>> It's what it identifies that we want to work with. How useful
>> would an
>> ISBN be if you couldn't plug it into Amazon or a library catalog
>> and get
>> the book? So it's what we can DO with URIs that matters, and right
>> now
>> if I get a URI for a vocabulary term ... well, what do I do?
>
> This is stated again and again, and still I don't see anyone in the
> library world seriously considering the most widely deployed
> protocol in
> existence - HTTP.
>
> It works. It's reliable. W3C has guidelines for deploying information
> about abstract entities over HTTP. What is lacking?
>
> /Mikael
>
>>
>> It's that part that is missing. And that's why I think we have
>> been slow
>> to adopt URIs. Maintaining a dependable, usable resolution service
>> is a
>> big job, and we will want a strong standard that makes using URIs
>> automatic and easy.
>>
And most recently we have the Linked Open Data movement catalyzing
the idea that all these URI should be resolvable and the simplest
approach to attaining such being the usage of HTTP.
http://linkeddata.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_Data
-Mark
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mark R. Diggory - DSpace Developer and Systems Manager
MIT Libraries, Systems and Technology Services
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Home Page: http://purl.org/net/mdiggory/homepage
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