Frans,
Great to hear that you're interested in applying Linked Data and to
promote it in the Netherlands - certainly a very active area ;)
I would welcome any advice on this topic from people who have had
some more experience with publishing Linked Data.
I find [1] a very useful page from a pragmatic perspective. If you're
more into books and not only focusing on the data side (see 'REST and
Linked Data: a match made for domain driven development?' [2] for more
details on data vs. API), I can also recommend [3], which offers some
more practical guidance in terms of URI space management.
Cheers,
Michael
[1] http://data.gov.uk/resources/uris
[2] http://ws-rest.org/2011/proc/a5-page.pdf
[3] http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529260
--
Dr. Michael Hausenblas, Research Fellow
LiDRC - Linked Data Research Centre
DERI - Digital Enterprise Research Institute
NUIG - National University of Ireland, Galway
Ireland, Europe
Tel. +353 91 495730
http://linkeddata.deri.ie/
http://sw-app.org/about.html
On 15 Apr 2011, at 13:48, Frans Knibbe wrote:
Hello,
Some newbie questions here...
I have recently come in contact with the concept of Linked Data and
I have become enthusiastic. I would like to promote the idea within
my company (we specialize is geographical data) and within my
country. I have read the excellent Linked Data book (“Linked Data:
Evolving the Web into a Global Data Space”) and I think I am almost
ready to start publishing Linked Data. I understand that it is
important to get the URIs right, and not have to change them later.
That is what my questions are about.
I have acquired the first part (authority) of my URIs, let's say it
is lod.mycompany.com. Now I am faced with the question: How do I
come up with a URI scheme that will stand the test of time? I think
I will start with publishing some FOAF data of myself and co-
workers. And then hopefully more and more data will follow. At this
moment I can not possible imagine which types of data we will
publish. They are likely to have some kind of geographical
component, but that is true for a lot of data. I believe it is not
possible to come up with any hierarchical structure that will
accommodate all types of data that might ever be published.
So I think it is best to leave out any indication of data
organization in the path element of the URI (i.e. http://lod.mycompany.com/people
is a bad idea). In my understanding, I could use base URIs like http://lod.mycompany.com/resource
, http://lod.mycompany.com/page and hhtp://lod.mycompany.com.data,
and then use unique identifiers for all the things I want to publish
something about. If I understand correctly, I don't need the URI to
describe the hierarchy of my data because all Linked Data are self-
describing. Nice.
But then I am faced with the problem: What method do I use to mint
my identifiers? Those identifiers need to be unique. Should I use a
number sequence, or a hash function? In those cases the URIs would
be uniform and give no indication of the type of data. But a number
sequence seems unsafe, and in the case of a hash function I would
still need to make some kind of structured choice of input values.
I would welcome any advice on this topic from people who have had
some more experience with publishing Linked Data.
Regards,
Frans Knibbe
