What do people have against URLs or URIs? (Updated)

Kingsley Uyi Idehen

kidehen@openlinksw.com — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 13:37:57 GMT

Simon,

Very nice meeting and chatting with you at Linked Data Planet :-)

Yes, there is a role for tools to play re. URIs deployment from a corpus of URLs. This is a pretty sizable opportunity for Linked Data Deployment middleware (imho) i.e wrapping URIs around URLs that basically connects the Document and the Things (Named Entities and Subject Matter) that the Document is about. I also see RDFa, when used in conjunction with the Biblogrphic Ontology, as a pretty neat route for resolving some of these matters.

Kingsley

Kingsley Uyi Idehen

kidehen@openlinksw.com — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 13:11:52 GMT

Dave,

Truly ironic :-) Especially as this was the result of a cut & paste job from my internal post about the same subject (even longer story).

Anyway, the link is fixed.

Thanks,

Kingsley

Simon Gibbs

simon.gibbs@cantorva.com — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 09:49:49 GMT

Hi Kingsley, I did enjoy your keynote at Linked Data Planet, and thank you for your advice IRL re licencing of DBpedia data.

I think one issue with adoption of URIs is that people feel the need to create the URL as a web document, analagous to a namespace document i.e. to make a GET on the URI dereferencable with a 200 status code and a meaningful representation in the response.

We see this a ludicrously low barrier (and I tend to feel is actually not necessary as a theoretically dereferencable URL in still better than a URN, IMHO) but if your an application developer working on a minor project inside a large corporate bureauocracy then you face the need to justify creating a space on a web server for the namespace documents, vocabulary documentation, OWL, RDFS and XSD documents etc. Unfortunately a lot of data processing tasks are very minor projects.

Project managers will probably support documentation for end users, but this kind of development documentation is often overlooked anyway and the requirement to explain - at length - what it is you are doing, what RDF is, what RDFS and OWL are, what a predicate is, why you aren't just using a database etc mean you're unlikely to get anywhere fast. Unless a developer has bought into the Linked Data concept and is willing and able to proselytise then they will prefer to just use an inverse fucntional property and stick to public vocabs - or hell - just to use a database.

There is a role for tools here I think...

Dave Beckett

dave@dajobe.org — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 06:00:23 GMT

Your first link to http://blogs.usnet.private:8893/weblog/kidehen@openlinksw.com/127/?id=13781 is broken/not public. Ironic in a post about URLs