I have to say that I really agree. The linked data community can be a
bit of an echo chamber sometimes and it's important to remember that
this stuff has to be doable by people who don't have phds and weeks to
learn it!
You only have to look at the terrifying badness of some RSS
functionality to realise that it can't be too easy to understand.
On 19/05/11 09:52, Martin Hepp wrote:
Hi Michael:
On May 18, 2011, at 8:37 PM, Michael F Uschold wrote:
Alan, I'm glad you made that suggestion. I was also glad to see that Tim-BL
acknowledged that the URIs are just identifiers.
Using URIs as identifiers does not imply they must not have human-readable
components. Otherwise, there was no need for alphanumeric URIs and the DNS
system at all.
As you know, noone seems to be treating them that way, nor is there good tool
support to make it easy to do -- probably the main reason the practice persists.
Part of Martin's argument is based on what he already did, given that, maybe he
is doing the right thing now.
Moving forward for the broader semantic web community, the more interesting
question is, if Martin was starting from scratch right now, would there still
be any good arguments for having URIs with meaningful names?
The only thing I would do differently when restarting now would be a using
shorter names for a few elements, and enforcing a bit of additional
terminological consistency.
Given the RDFa context:
• How much effort would it be, in terms of extra tool support, or
training users etc.
• Would it have even been possible to get GR off the ground in todays
market place w/o meaningful URIs?
It would be disaster to use URIs without meaningful names.
Martin
--
Christopher Gutteridge -- http://id.ecs.soton.ac.uk/person/1248
/ Lead Developer, EPrints Project, http://eprints.org/
/ Web Projects Manager, ECS, University of Southampton,
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
/ Webmaster, Web Science Trust, http://www.webscience.org/
