Hi
All,
(from
Sean)
"The issues of broken links is a difficult one
because once the primary source at a particular location disappears you have
nothing left to go on to find a copy of the thing named besides what you can
find in the WayBack machine or perhaps a Google
cache."
A
great example of this is the www.i3c.org link
where the primary work on implementing the LSID specification was documented
originally.
cheers,
Michael
Michael Miller
Lead Software Developer
Rosetta Biosoftware Business Unit
www.rosettabio.com
Lead Software Developer
Rosetta Biosoftware Business Unit
www.rosettabio.com
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Sean Martin
Sent: Friday, July 21, 2006 8:10 AM
To: public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org
Subject: Re: BioRDF: URI Best Practices
Hi Alan,
> So my proposal suggests a class that defines ways of transforming the
> URI you find in a SW document into URLs that get specific types of
> information. The fact that a transform to URL is provided means you get
> the transport (because it is part of the transformed URL). Different
> properties of the class let you retrieve different patterns for
> different sorts of information (1.). The representation 2., is not
> explicitly represented, it should instead be part of the definitions of
> the properties. We typically want to know *before* we dereference, what
> we would get back.
> There's more to elaborate about such a proposal and details to work
> out, but I think, for instance, that it can handle the LSID use cases.
>
This sounds interesting. Please could you elaborate a little so that we can think it through to see what exactly it does address and what it would entail. It seems to me some of it may well work in the situations where the web is current and you actually have a SW document (an LSID is also intended as an persistent independent reference which can be used as the key to a 3rd party annotation for example), but as a long term naming/dereferencing solution it breaks down as the web backing it ages and bit rot sets in.
Perhaps this is one of the key problems with using URLs as names for things that have a digital existence. The issues of broken links is a difficult one because once the primary source at a particular location disappears you have nothing left to go on to find a copy of the thing named besides what you can find in the WayBack machine or perhaps a Google cache. As I suggested in my last post, have a look at your emails from a year or two back and see what percentage of URL links still work. The fact is that organizations change direction, people move, machines break or are reorganized and so too does the web that echoes this. I have always found that the web reflecting what is current is usually ok, but the web reflecting the past state of things is much much less so. Of course sometimes it is even hard to figure out what is actually current too! Unfortunately repeatable science and of course legal obligations require us to have decent answers here too, or am I missing something?
Kindest regards, Sean
--
Sean Martin
IBM Corp
