[light discussion] "Semantic Aware Identifiers"

["Giovanni Bartolomeo" <giovanni.bartolomeo@uniroma2.it>]

Dear Colleagues,

some days ago I was talking with some colleagues trying to explain  
what XDI is for and how XRI relates to XDI. I came to say that XRIs  
are a new class of identifiers, which, unlike URIs, are "semantic  
aware". The expression

    *semantic* *aware* *identifiers*

seemed to me to well describe XRIs, especially when used inside XDI  
documents. If you like, I think that we could use this expression to  
describe our work... and to label the whole wide area of  
investigations that could - hopefully - be created consequently.

What do you think?

Kind Regards,
Giovanni

PS: for those who want to read a bit more... some thoughts during  
these days led me to formulate this rough timeline: (do you have any  
other reference you think could be useful to report?)

June 1994 At CERN, Sir Berners-Lee defines the Universal Resource  
Identifiers [RFC1630]. URIs are opaque to clients: the Web is designed  
so that agents communicate resource information state through  
representations, not identifiers. HTTP clients cannot determine the  
type of a resource representation by inspecting a URI for that resource.

May 2007 J. Rosenberg defines an algorithm for constructing a URI that  
can be used to reference pieces of information that contained in XML  
documents distributed over the Web [RFC4825]. The perspective is now  
reversed: XCAP clients are aware of the meaning contained in the XCAP  
identifiers they use, but servers are (almost) not needed to  
understand them.

September 2010 At OASIS, *semantic* *aware* *identifiers* are  
introduced. They are built in a way so that they could be used to  
address concepts, individuals, roles and any possible way they could  
be legitimately combined within a description logic. Clients  
explicitly understand the semantics behind identifiers and perform  
reasoning on them. Two biggest problems of modern Internet - data  
mining and data interoperability - are natively solved by this  
approach... :-)


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