1.A should URIs be name-based or meaningless?

[Patrick Durusau <Patrick.Durusau@sbl-site.org>]

Greetings!

Trying to follow my own call for more posts. ;-)

On the question: 1.A should URIs be name-based or meaningless?

My gut reaction is that URIs, intended for human use, should be name-based.

Without belaboring the history of DNS, I think we all find it easier to 
enter: http://www.ontopia.net as opposed its actual IP address.

I think the same will be true for human authors who are using PSIs in 
documents. Some applications with well constructed authoring interfaces, 
may choose to use meaningless URIs for one or more reasons, that are not 
displayed to the user. (Thinking os high security environments where the 
person who can choose a tokent that represents a PSI, but may not have a 
need to know the structure behind it or even where it is located.)

Another point, which I am not sure Lars intended to raise by this 
question, is that I would anticipate a practice of having the domain 
name part of the PSI actually reflect that it is a PSI.

For example, if the SBL were to start offering PSIs for biblical topics, 
I would anticipate obtaining a domain name like: psi.sbl-site.org. Does 
a couple of things: First, by custom (hopefully in the near future) 
anyone using that domain name recognizes that this is a PSI domain. 
Second, it clearly associates the PSIs found there with a domain that 
hopefully the user recognizes from other contexts as being the site from 
which they trust PSIs.

Continuing down the PSI string as it were, I would also anticipate that 
the naming structure of the PSI would reflect something recognized in 
the domain of its intended use. I could quite easily say that Bible 
references start with the verse, followed by chapter, then book name, 
thus: http://psi.sbl-site.org/1/1/John, but that would be counter 
intuiative to my anticipated user community. On the other hand, if I 
entered: http://psi.sbl-site.org/John/1/1, there would be little doubt 
as to what was meant, at least among students of the Bible.

Obviously the structure of PSIs past the domain name are going to vary, 
as they should, in order to reflect the expectations of the typical user 
community who will be using them. A lot of the reference systems in use 
in biblical studies would probably seem at least odd if not deliberately 
obscure to a mathematics professor but then the indexing of articles by 
the MAA (Mathematical Association of America) would probably seem odd to 
most biblical scholars. Neither one is particularly better than the 
other and both rely upon familiarity with their respective domains to 
fill what is left unexplained.

Will try to reach some more of the excellent questions that Lars raised 
tomorrow.

Hope everyone is having a great day!

Patrick

-- 
Patrick Durusau
Director of Research and Development
Society of Biblical Literature
Patrick.Durusau@sbl-site.org
Chair, V1 - Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface
Co-Editor, ISO 13250, Topic Maps -- Reference Model

Topic Maps: Human, not artificial, intelligence at work!