IRIs instead of URIs

Recently while working with Arabic legislation from Palestine, I found the odd contradiction that though the document was entirely in Arabic, the FRBR metadata URI refered to the documents using English terminology. e.g. /ps/judgement/1998-03-01 , which seemed odd because there was no english being used anywhere else (in fact many of the users of these documents may not be familiar with English at all) - right now it isnt possible to use Arabic (or other non latin script languages like Tamil or Chinese ) in Akoma Ntoso URIs - for e.g we cannot use حكم قضائي in a Akoma Ntoso URI (which is the arabic translation of a judgement)

As suggested by Fabio earlier in response to my first email on this sometime back - it makes sense to support IRIs in Akoma Ntoso URIs as there is a much larger character-set supported by it, and it would support most non-latin writing systems. The way to do it currently in Akoma Ntoso is to use only US-ASCII character set and represent other writing systems by %-age encoding the letters - which is not really human readable and defeats the purpose of having readable URIs. Also a point to note is that ICANN approved IDN (internationalized domain names ) back in 2010.

Ashok

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