Hi Bernard, Scott, others,
Bernard Vatant wrote:
For the first point I guess if LoC is not able to ensure stable URIs
inside its DNS, who will? And both from a social (trust) point of view
and technical one, I prefer to have URIs in the id.loc.gov
<http://id.loc.gov> namespace than in some more or less opaque purl
one. For example all fundamental W3C spec at the basis of all the RDF
ecosystem are in the w3.org <http://w3.org> DNS, and the W3C has a
policy of URI stability which IMO can be adopted by LoC.
Yes, I agree.
Of course one can ask why LoC does not publish (yet) also URIs for
639-3, but hopefully it's in the pipes, as well as countries ISO-3166
as Lars Marius points (those were also in the original OASIS Published
Subjects publication ...). But id.loc.gov <http://id.loc.gov> have
639-5 entries.
Well, I would say that ISO 639-3 URIs (and to some extent ISO 3166 URIs)
are rather unlikely to
come from the Library of Congress, given that they are not the
responsible ISO RA/MA.
That other data sets will provide better or more complete information
about things identified by those URIs is not a problem. I think it's
OK if a reference URI provides just the minimal description needed for
disambiguation and context, and basis for maximal re-use. To take a
completely different example, what is the most reused URI in the LOD,
beyond the URI in standards themselves RDF, RDFS, OWL? Certainly
http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Person. What does FOAF itself provide about
this class? Not much. But the fact that millions of triples use it
make it a reference, both at vocabulary and data level, can help to
figure what a foaf:Person can be. For example go to
http://labs.mondeca.com/endpoint/lov_aggregator and run the proposed
default query ...
Yes, in general I agree, but there seem to be some pragmatic issues
involved here as well.
After all, there is a reason why people are not just using URNs.
The referent "in the real world" of
http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/iso639-2/grc is as fuzzy as the referent
of http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Person. It's indeed a conceptualization
of a language, which has been defined by ISO 639-2 standard according
to criteria most people won't argue about, and some will disagree upon
for good reasons. And that's why we have 639-3. As any classification
of languages, this one defines arbitrary limits in a continuum. What
is a language limit in the real world is and will ever be an open
question. But information systems simply rely on codes provided by an
authority to which they defer the tricky task of deciding about it.
Yes, the referent of one URI for the French language can be different
from the referent of another (e.g.
one may exclude certain dialects or historical variants). In this sense,
indeed every URI *involves* an
associated conceptualization.
However, many interpret SKOS concept URIs as actually *denoting* the
concept per se, which can then
be related via the foaf:focus property [1,2] to the resource
corresponding to the actual referent. So do
you believe that a SKOS concept for French has the same ontological
status as
<http://dbpedia.org/resource/French_language>?
Best,
Gerard
[1] http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/#term_focus
[2] http://wiki.foaf-project.org/w/term_focus
--
Gerard de Melo [dem...@icsi.berkeley.edu]
http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~demelo/
