I really enjoyed the linked data session at WWW 2007:
- Use URIs as names for things
- Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names
- When someone looks up a URI, provide useful information
- Include links to other URIs so that they can discover more things
All Webby goodness! What's not to like? But one issue has stuck in my head since asking the obvious question:
It seems that folks like Yahoo! and Twittervision offer different representations of the same resource using different URIs .xml, .json, .php, .yaml, etc. I'd say that's arisen because users have little control over content-negotiation in their browser. Isn't having the same resource identified by lots of different URIs an issue for the Semantic Web?
At the time Timbl offered the same answer as Danny Ayres, use OWL to say the two URIs are the same:
<http://DBpedia.org/resource/Berlin>
owl:sameAs
<http://sws.geonames.org/2950159>
But isn't it be better just to use the Content-Location HTTP header in the reference? I'm almost ready to contemplate embracing RDF, but does that really mean I have to grok someone else's out-of-band metacrap just to process it?
I'm also baffled why more RDF folks aren't embracing OpenID, seems like every world changing demo I see still uses usernames to identify users, not URIs. What's that all about?