Hi Frans,
re. URI design patterns, I would highly recommend you to have a look at
a presentation that describes how they are doing it at BBC [1].
Furthermore, I asked a question on SemanticOverflow (now
answers.semanticweb.com) some time ago that deals with URI template
specifications for Linked Data publishing [2]. Niklas Lindström
recommended the CoIN Vocabulary [3] for that purpose. It looks quite
interesting.
Cheers,
Bob
[1] http://www.slideshare.net/reduxd/beyond-the-polar-bear
[2]
http://answers.semanticweb.com/questions/2858/uri-template-specifications-for-linked-data-publishing
[3] http://code.google.com/p/court/wiki/COIN
On 4/15/2011 2:48 PM, Frans Knibbe wrote:
Hello,
Some newbie questions here...
I have recently come in contact with the concept of Linked Data and I
have become enthusiastic. I would like to promote the idea within my
company (we specialize is geographical data) and within my country. I
have read the excellent Linked Data book (“Linked Data: Evolving the Web
into a Global Data Space”) and I think I am almost ready to start
publishing Linked Data. I understand that it is important to get the
URIs right, and not have to change them later. That is what my questions
are about.
I have acquired the first part (authority) of my URIs, let's say it is
lod.mycompany.com. Now I am faced with the question: How do I come up
with a URI scheme that will stand the test of time? I think I will start
with publishing some FOAF data of myself and co-workers. And then
hopefully more and more data will follow. At this moment I can not
possible imagine which types of data we will publish. They are likely to
have some kind of geographical component, but that is true for a lot of
data. I believe it is not possible to come up with any hierarchical
structure that will accommodate all types of data that might ever be
published.
So I think it is best to leave out any indication of data organization
in the path element of the URI (i.e. http://lod.mycompany.com/people is
a bad idea). In my understanding, I could use base URIs like
http://lod.mycompany.com/resource, http://lod.mycompany.com/page and
hhtp://lod.mycompany.com.data, and then use unique identifiers for all
the things I want to publish something about. If I understand correctly,
I don't need the URI to describe the hierarchy of my data because all
Linked Data are self-describing. Nice.
But then I am faced with the problem: What method do I use to mint my
identifiers? Those identifiers need to be unique. Should I use a number
sequence, or a hash function? In those cases the URIs would be uniform
and give no indication of the type of data. But a number sequence seems
unsafe, and in the case of a hash function I would still need to make
some kind of structured choice of input values.
I would welcome any advice on this topic from people who have had some
more experience with publishing Linked Data.
Regards,
Frans Knibbe
