In the RDF, what URI would you use for the species concept?

If it is http://www.speciesid.org/species/45ae56895967 (which seems the logical choice), then you need some way for RDF documents to refer to this URI, but also have Semantic Web browsers be able to get the RDF document that provides the metadata about the URI. This is what the 303 does.

Put another way, the issue is what convention do we use to say that "the RDF version of metadata about this URI is available here". How do we tell browsers/semantic web crawlers/etc. to find this info? The 303 redirect is one way of doing this, and is being adopted by Semantic Web tools (of course, as with all these things not everyone likes the 303 solution).

Having a rule that says "let's add .rdf to the URI" is fine, except how do tools developed by other communities know that this is the rule? If we adopt one ad hoc solution and others adopt another, we loose interoperability. For me, this is vital to avoid our own little ghetto.

The 303 redirection/hash idea is in one sense ad hoc, but it is being adopted, and will also work with REST (the client just needs to be able to handle redirection).

You could, of course, do both. Adopt the convention you describe, but also support 303 redirects so that Semantic Web tools are happy.

Regarding HTML, there are all sorts of ways to do this. My http://bioguid.info toy uses a XSL style sheet to display HTML by default in a web browser (if you "view source") you'll see it's just RDF under the hood.

Regards

Rod

On 25 Apr 2007, at 18:14, Pete DeVries wrote:

Hi Everyone,

I was wondering if it would not be simpler to have the following uri structure.

http://www.speciesid.org/species/45ae56895967 <- the concept of the species (uri)

http://www.speciesid.org/species/45ae56895967.xml <- species concept info as xml

http://www.speciesid.org/species/45ae56895967.rdf <- species concept info as rdf

It is even possible to have a .html if you want a human readable page. The fact that a web server by default adds an .html to a request does not mean that the concept uri and the html species page are the same thing.

This would be easy to setup either as static pages, or by using a database driven site. The 303 redirection and the hash technique both seem to be more complex than they need to be.

The structure above is also very ameanable to REST style webservices.

• Pete

On 4/16/07, Markus Döring m.doering@bgbm.org wrote:

...

Dear all, I don't really intend to fire up a new discussion about GUIDs, but I came across some pretty good documents about URIs I thought I share with you. They adress pretty much all of our needs for persistent and resolvable identifiers in these texts.

(1) http://www.dfki.uni-kl.de/dfkidok/publications/TM/07/01/tm-07-01.pdf "Cool URIs for the Semantic Web" by Leo Sauermann DFKI GmbH, Richard Cyganiak Freie Universität Berlin (D2R author), Max Völkel FZI Karlsruhe The authors of this document come from the semantic web community and discuss what kind of URIs should be used for RDF resources.

(2) http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/URNsAndRegistries-50 This one here is written by the W3C and addresses the questions "When should URNs or URIs with novel URI schemes be used to name information resources for the Web?" The answers given are "Rarely if ever" and "Probably not". Common arguments in favor of such novel naming schemas are examined, and their properties compared with those of the existing http: URI scheme.

best wishes, Markus Döring

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------------------------------------------------------------------------ ---------------------------------------- Professor Roderic D. M. Page Editor, Systematic Biology DEEB, IBLS Graham Kerr Building University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QP United Kingdom

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