Hello,
Thank you all for your responses and the wealth of advice and
information. Lots of interesting reading material, and introductions to
problems I was not aware of yet too :-).
I am more at ease about the minting problem now. I think I was looking
for some kind of well-defined method of minting all present and future
URIs. But then I came to realize that it is not the purpose of the URI
to convey information, it is just a pointer to information.
Specifically, it was this sentence from the article about REST and
Linked Data (http://ws-rest.org/2011/proc/a5-page.pdf) that enlightened me:
“A common misapplication of both approaches is to assume semantics (or
abuse implied semantics) encoded in a URI, when both REST and Linked
Data explicitly expect clients to regard URIs as opaque strings when
used for identifi cation.”
So if my future URIs look a bit different from my present URIs because
they are produced by another method, that should not be a problem. This
means I can now focus on getting the URIs right for the data that I want
to publish now, and that I don't need to plan ahead for the future. That
is a relief.
Regards,
Frans
On 2011-04-15 14:48, 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
