Michael Schneider wrote:
I think people do quickly adopt any technical term, if the thing that it
denotes becomes interesting or relevant to them, or to large parts of the
society. People know what /firewalls/ or /dynamic IP addresses/ are, or what
the term /bitrate/ means for their favorite /audio compression format/, and
they know all sorts of technical terms related to microprocessors or hard
disks, etc.
In particular, they have already learnt what the term /URL/ means, they have
not been born with this knowledge. So why shouldn't they learn /URI/?
What do you mean by URI?
Do you mean the Abstraction atop URN and URL? If so, taking that at face
value doesn't unveil the existence of the Generic HTTP scheme URI for
Naming, and there lies the problem. See the broken capsule depiction [1]
to see why I say this, notice the unlabeled intersection of URL and URN?
Certainly not just because of confusion due to the large similarity of these
two terms. People can distinguish between so many different acronyms (for
example, the many 3-letter abbreviations of German football clubs come to
mind :-)), they will hardly fail on this particular one, if they /have/ to
learn it or /want/ to learn it.
So why don't people adopt the term "URI"? Instead of trying to re-mint terms
(don't touch the Wikipedia article! ;-)), you may rather see the
non-satisfying situation as an indicator: namely for how relevant or
interesting the term "URI" (and what it is intended to refer to) is for
people and society at the moment.
The name is not the issue.
Being clear about using Generic HTTP scheme URI for resolvable Naming is
the issue.
Links:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:URI_Venn_Diagram.svg
Kingsley
Best,
Michael
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]
On Behalf Of Dan Brickley
Sent: Sunday, April 18, 2010 12:18 PM
To: Semantic Web; public-lod
Subject: Fwd: backronym proposal: Universal Resource Linker
So - I'm serious. The term 'URI' has never really worked as something
most Web users encounter and understand.
For RDF, SemWeb and linked data efforts, this is a problem as our data
model is built around URIs.
If 'URL' can be brought back from limbo as a credible technical term,
and rebranded around the concept of 'linkage', I think it'll go a long
way towards explaining what we're up to with RDF.
Thoughts?
Dan
--
Dipl.-Inform. Michael Schneider
Research Scientist, Information Process Engineering (IPE)
Tel : +49-721-9654-726
Fax : +49-721-9654-727
Email: [email protected]
WWW : http://www.fzi.de/michael.schneider
=======================================================================
FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik an der Universität Karlsruhe
Haid-und-Neu-Str. 10-14, D-76131 Karlsruhe
Tel.: +49-721-9654-0, Fax: +49-721-9654-959
Stiftung des bürgerlichen Rechts, Az 14-0563.1, RP Karlsruhe
Vorstand: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Rüdiger Dillmann, Dipl. Wi.-Ing. Michael Flor,
Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Wolffried Stucky, Prof. Dr. Rudi Studer
Vorsitzender des Kuratoriums: Ministerialdirigent Günther Leßnerkraus
=======================================================================
--
Regards,
Kingsley Idehen
President & CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen
