Hi David,
Yes, one could use URL shorteners and that's probably the only sane way
to go but it's still not ideal because:
1. Both Bitly and Tinyurl come with "no guarantee of service" (and a
lot of tracking) - Google's goo.gl is all wrapped up with their services
too - not the kind of thing public administrations will be happy about
using. Yves Lafon's http://kwz.me is a pure shortener with no tracking
of any kind but it's a one man project so, again, it won't be 'good
enough' for public sector data.
2. Neither a shortened URL nor the long form tell a human reader a lot
whereas something (non-standard I know) like urn:iso/iec:5218:2004 tells
you that it's an ISO standard that a human can look up. The ISO
catalogue URLs point to Web pages or PDFs available from those Web pages
so you still need to be a human to get the information. The danger would
be that a machine would look up the datatype URI and expect to get data
back, not ISO's paywall :-)
So, not ideal, but still the best (practical) solution?
On 03/04/2012 15:38, David Booth wrote:
On Tue, 2012-04-03 at 14:33 +0100, Phil Archer wrote:
[ . . . ] The actual URI for it is
http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=36266
(or rather, that's the page about the spec but that's a side issue for
now).
That URI is just horrible and certainly not a 'cool URI'. The Eurostat
one is no better.
Does the datatype URI have to resolve to anything (in theory no, but in
practice? Would a URN be appropriate?
It's helpful to be able to click on the URI to figure out what exactly
was meant. How about just using a URI shortener, such as tinyurl.com or
bit.ly?
--
Phil Archer
W3C eGovernment
http://www.w3.org/egov/
http://philarcher.org
+44 (0)7887 767755
@philarcher1
