On 4/29/10 12:32 PM, MJ Suhonos wrote:
What I hope for is that OpenURL 1.0 eventually takes a place alongside SGML as
a too-complex standard that directly paves the way for a universally adopted
foundational technology like XML. What I fear is that it takes a place
alongside MARC as an anachronistic standard that paralyzes an entire industry.
Hear hear.
I'm actually encouraged by Benjamin's linking (har har) to the httpRange-14 issue as being relevant
to the concept of "link resolution", or at least redirection (indirection?) using URL
surrogates for resources. Many are critical of the TAG's "resolution" (har har har) of
the issue, and think it places too much on the 303 redirect.
I'm afraid I still don't understand the issue fully enough to comment — though I'd love
to hear from any who can. I agree with Eric's hope that the library world can look to
W3C's thinking to inform a "better way" forward for link resolving, though.
One key thing to remember with the W3C work is that URL's have to be
dereference-able. I can't lookup (without an OpenLink resolver or Google
or the like) a url:isbn:{whatever}, but I can dereference
http://dbpedia.org/resource/The_Lord_of_the_Rings -- which 303's to
http://dbpedia.org/page/The_Lord_of_the_Rings -- which is full of more
/resource/ dereferencable (via 303 See Other) URL's.
The main thing that the W3C was trying to avoid was RDF that
inadvertently talks about online documents when what it really wants to
talk about is the "real thing." Real things (like books) need a URI, but
ideally a URI that can be dereferenced (via HTTP in this case) to give
them some information about that real thing--which isn't possible with
the urn:isbn style schemes.
That's my primitive understanding of it anyway. Apologies if any
overlaps with library tech are off. :)
