Hi Michael: On May 18, 2011, at 8:37 PM, Michael F Uschold wrote: > Alan, I'm glad you made that suggestion. I was also glad to see that Tim-BL > acknowledged that the URIs are just identifiers.
Using URIs as identifiers does not imply they must not have human-readable components. Otherwise, there was no need for alphanumeric URIs and the DNS system at all. > As you know, noone seems to be treating them that way, nor is there good tool > support to make it easy to do -- probably the main reason the practice > persists. > > Part of Martin's argument is based on what he already did, given that, maybe > he is doing the right thing now. > > Moving forward for the broader semantic web community, the more interesting > question is, if Martin was starting from scratch right now, would there still > be any good arguments for having URIs with meaningful names? The only thing I would do differently when restarting now would be a using shorter names for a few elements, and enforcing a bit of additional terminological consistency. > Given the RDFa context: > • How much effort would it be, in terms of extra tool support, or > training users etc. > • Would it have even been possible to get GR off the ground in todays > market place w/o meaningful URIs? It would be disaster to use URIs without meaningful names. Martin
