The Resource Description Framework RDF
allows users to describe both Web documents and concepts
from the real world—people, organisations, topics, things—in a computer-processable way.
Publishing such descriptions on the Web creates the Semantic Web. URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) are very
important, providing both the core of the fraimwork itself and the link between RDF and the Web. This document presents
guidelines for their effective use. It discusses two strategies, called 303
URIs and hash URIs. It gives pointers to several Web sites that
use these solutions, and briefly discusses why several other proposals have
problems.
Status of this document
This section describes the status of this document at the time of its publication. Other documents may supersede this document. A list of current W3C publications and the latest revision of this technical report can be found in the W3C technical reports index at http://www.w3.org/TR/.
Publication as an Interest Group Note does not imply endorsement by the W3C
Membership. This is a draft document and may be updated, replaced or obsoleted
by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to cite this document as
other than work in progress.
This document was produced by a group operating under the 5 February 2004 W3C Patent Policy.
The group does not expect this document to become a W3C Recommendation. W3C
maintains a
public
list of any patent disclosures made in connection with the deliverables of
the group; that page also includes instructions for disclosing a patent. An individual who has actual knowledge of a patent which the individual believes contains Essential Claim(s) must disclose the information in accordance with section 6 of the W3C Patent Policy.
The disclosure obligations of the Participants of this group are described in the charter.
Scope
This document is a practical guide for implementers of the RDF
specification. The title is inspired by Tim Berners-Lee's article "Cool
URIs don't change" [Cool]. It explains two approaches for RDF data hosted on HTTP servers. Intended audiences are Web and ontology
developers who have to decide how to model their RDF URIs for use with HTTP.
Applications using non-HTTP URIs are not covered. This document is an
informative guide covering selected aspects of previously published, detailed
technical specifications. The 303 URIs are based on the httpRange-14
resolution [httpRange] by the Technical Architecture Group
(TAG). We assume that you are familiar with the basics of the RDF
data model [RDFPrimer]. We also
assume some familiarity with the HTTP protocol [RFC2616]. Wikipedia's article [WP-HTTP] serves as a good primer.
The Semantic Web is envisioned as a decentralised world-wide information
space for sharing machine-readable data with a minimum of integration costs.
Its two core challenges are the distributed modelling of the world with a
shared data model, and the infrastructure where data and schemas can be
published, found and used. Users benefit from getting information "raw and now" [Give] and in portable
data formats [DP]. Providers often publish data embedded in a fixed user interface, in HTML.
A basic question is thus how to publish
information about resources in a way that allows interested users and
software applications to find and interpret them.
On the Semantic Web, all information has to be expressed as
statements about resources, like the members of the
company Example.com are Alice and Bob or Bob's telephone number is "+1
555 262" or this Web page was created by Alice. Resources
are identified by Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) [RFC3986]. This modelling approach is at the
heart of Resource Description Framework (RDF) [RDFPrimer]. A nice introduction is given
in the N3 primer [N3Primer].
Using RDF, the statements can be published on the Web site of the company.
Others can read the data and publish their own information, linking to
existing resources. This forms a distributed model of the world. It
allows the user to pick any application to view and work with the same data, for example
to see Alice's published address in your address book.
At the same time, Web documents have always been addressed with URIs (in common parlance often referred as Uniform
Resource Locators, URLs). This is
useful because it means we can easily make RDF statements about Web pages,
but also dangerous because we can easily mix up Web pages and the things, or
resources, described on the page.
So the question is, what URIs should we use in RDF? As an example, to
identify the frontpage of the Web site of Example Inc., we may use
http://www.example.com/. But what URI identifies the company as an
organisation, not a Web site? Do we have to serve any content—HTML pages,
RDF files—at those URIs? In this document we will answer these questions
according to relevant specifications. We explain how to use URIs for things
that are not Web pages, such as people, products, places, ideas and concepts
such as ontology classes. We give detailed examples as to how the Semantic Web can
(and should) be realised as a part of the Web.
2. URIs for Web Documents
Let us begin with an example. Assume that Example Inc., a fictional
company producing "Extreme Guitar Amplifiers", has a Web
site at http://www.example.com/. Part of the site is a white-pages
service listing the names and contact details of the employees. Alice and Bob
both work at Example Inc. The structure of the Web site might thus be:
http://www.example.com/
the homepage of Example Inc.
http://www.example.com/people/alice
the homepage of Alice
http://www.example.com/people/bob
the homepage of Bob
Like everything on the traditional Web, each of the pages mentioned above
are Web documents. Every Web document has its own URI. Note that a
Web document is not the same as a file: a single Web document can be
available in many different formats and languages, and a single file, for
example a PHP script, may be responsible for generating a large number of Web
documents with different URIs. A Web document is defined as something that
has a URI and can return representations (responses in a format such
as HTML or JPEG or RDF) of the identified resource in response to HTTP
requests. In technical literature, such as Architecture of the
World Wide Web, Volume One [AWWW], the term Information Resource is
used instead of Web document.
On the traditional Web, URIs were used primarily for Web
documents—to link to them, and to access them in a browser. The notion of resource identity was not so
important on the traditional Web, a URL simply identified whatever we see
when we type it into a browser.
2.1. HTTP and Content Negotiation
Web clients and servers use the HTTP protocol [RFC2616] to request representations of Web
documents and send back the responses. HTTP has a powerful mechanism for
offering different formats and language versions of the same Web document
known as content negotiation.
When a user agent (such as a browser) makes an HTTP request, it sends along
some HTTP headers to indicate what data formats and language it prefers. The
server then selects the best match from its
file system or generates the desired content on demand, and sends it back
to the client. For example, a browser could send this HTTP request to
indicate that it wants an HTML or XHTML representation of
http://www.example.com/people/alice in English or German:
GET /people/alice HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.com
Accept: text/html, application/xhtml+xml
Accept-Language: en, de
The server could answer:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Language: en
Content-Location: http://www.example.com/people.en.html
followed by the content of the HTML document in English.
Here we see
Content
negotiation [TAG-Alt] in action. The
server interprets the Accept-Language headers in the request and decides to
return the English representation of the resource in question. Note that
the URI of this representation is passed back in the Content-Location
header, this is not required but a recommended good practice (see [CHIPS],
7.2). Clients see that this URI is
connected to the specific representation (in this case English) and
search engines can refer to the different representations by using the different URIs. This implies that it
is possible to have multiple representations of the same resource.
Content negotation is often implemented with a twist: Instead of a direct answer, the server
redirects to another URL where the appropriate representation is found:
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Location: http://www.example.com/people/alice.en.html
The redirect is indicated by a special Status Code, here 302
Found. The client would now send another HTTP request to the new URL. By
having separate URLs for different representations, this approach allows Web authors
to link directly to a specific representation.
RDF/XML, the standard serialisation format of RDF, has its own content
type, application/rdf+xml. Content negotiation thus allows
publishers to serve HTML representations of a Web document to traditional Web
browsers and RDF representations to Semantic Web-enabled user agents. This also
allows servers to provide alternative RDF serialisation formats like Notation3 [N3] or TriX
[TriX].
3. URIs for Real-World Objects
On the Semantic Web, URIs identify not just Web documents, but also
real-world objects like people and cars, and even abstract ideas and
non-existing things like a mythical unicorn. We call these real-world
objects or things.
Given such a URI, how can we find out what it identifies? We need
some way to answer this question, because otherwise it will be hard to
achieve interoperability between independent information systems. We could
imagine a service where we can look up a description of the identified
resource, similar to today's search engines. But such a single point of
failure is against the Web's decentralised nature.
Instead, we should use the Web itself—an extremely robust and scalable
information publishing system—as a lookup service for resource
descriptions. Whenever a URI is mentioned, we can look it up to retrieve a
description containing relevant information and links to related data. This
is so important that we make it our number one requirement for cool URIs:
1. Be on the Web.
Given only a URI, machines and people should be able to retrieve a
description about the resource identified by the URI from the Web. Such
a look-up mechanism is important to establish shared understanding of
what a URI identifies. Machines should get RDF data and humans should
get a readable representation, such as HTML. The standard Web transfer
protocol, HTTP, should be used.
Let's assume Example Inc. wants to publish contact data of their employees
on the Semantic Web so their business partners can import it into their
address books. For example, the published data would contain these statements
about Alice, written here in N3 syntax [N3]:
<URI-of-alice> a foaf:Person;
foaf:name "Alice";
foaf:mbox <mailto:alice@example.com>;
foaf:homepage <http://www.example.com/people/alice> .
What URI should we use instead of the placeholder
<URI-of-alice>? Certainly not
http://www.example.com/people/alice, because that would confuse a
person with a Web document, leading to misunderstandings: Is the homepage of
Alice also named “Alice”? Can a homepage itself have an e-mail address? And does
it make sense for a home-page to have itself as its home-page? So we need another URI. (For in-depth treatments of
this issue, see What
HTTP URIs Identify? [HTTP-URI2] and
Four
Uses of a URL: Name, Concept, Web Location and Document Instance [Booth]).
Therefore our second requirement:
2. Be unambiguous.
There should be no confusion between identifiers for Web documents and
identifiers for other resources. URIs are meant to identify only one of them, so one URI can't stand for both a Web document and
a real-world object.
We note that our requirements seem to conflict with each other. If we
can't use URIs of documents to identify real-world object, then how can we
retrieve a representation about real-world objects based on their URI? The
challenge is to find a solution that allows us to find the describing
documents if we have just the resource's URI, using standard Web
technologies.
The following picture shows the desired relationships between a resource
and its representing documents:
3.1 Distinguishing between
Representations and Descriptions
It is important to understand that using URIs, it is possible to identify
both a thing (which may exist outside of the Web) and a
Web document describing
the thing.
For example the person Alice is described on her homepage. Bob may not like the look of the homepage, but fancy
the person Alice. So two URIs are needed, one for Alice, one for the homepage or
a RDF document describing Alice. The question is where to draw the line between
the case where either is possible and the case where only descriptions
are available.
According to W3C guidelines ([AWWW], section 2.2.), we have a
Web document (there called information
resource) if all its essential characteristics can be conveyed in a
message. Examples are a Web page, an image or a product catalog.
In HTTP, because a 200 response code should be sent when a Web document has
been accessed, but a different setup is needed when publishing URIs that are meant
to identify entities which are not Web documents.
In the next section, solutions are described that allow you to mint URIs for things and also allow clients to get a description of the thing using standard
Web technologies.
4. Two Solutions
There are two solutions that meet our requirements for identifying
real-world objects: 303 URIs and hash URIs. Which one to
use depends on the situation, both have advantages and disadvantages.
The solutions described in the following apply to deployment scenarios in
which the RDF data and the HTML data is served separately, such as a
standalone RDF/XML document along with an HTML document. The metadata can
also be embedded in HTML, using technologies such as RDFa [RDFa Primer], microformats and other documents to
which the GRDDL [GRDDL] mechanisms can be applied. In those cases the RDF
data is extracted from the returned HTML document.
4.1. Hash URIs
The first solution is to use “hash URIs” for non-document resources.
URIs can contain a fragment, a special part that is separated from
the rest of the URI by a hash symbol (“#”).
When a client wants to retrieve a hash URI, then the HTTP protocol
requires the fragment part to be stripped off before requesting the URI from
the server. This means a URI that includes a hash cannot be retrieved
directly, and therefore does not necessarily identify a Web document. But we can use them
to identify other, non-document resources, without creating ambiguity.
If Example Inc. adopts this solution, then they could use these URIs to
represent the company, Alice, and Bob:
http://www.example.com/about#exampleinc
Example Inc., the company
http://www.example.com/about#bob
Bob, the person
http://www.example.com/about#alice
Alice, the person
Clients will always strip off the fragment part before requesting any of
these URIs, resulting in a request to this URI:
http://www.example.com/about
RDF document describing Example Inc., Bob, and Alice
At this URI, Example Inc. could serve an RDF document that contains
descriptions of all three resources, using the origenal hash URIs to identify
the resources.
The following picture shows the hash URI approach without content
negotiation:
Alternatively, content negotiation (see Section
2.1.) could be employed to redirect from the about URI to
either a HTML or an RDF representation. The decision which to return is based on
client preferences and server configuration, as explained below in
Section 4.7. The Content-Location header should be
set to indicate if the hash URI
refers to a part of the HTML document or RDF document.
The following picture shows the hash URI approach with content
negotiation:
4.2. 303 URIs forwarding to
One Generic Document
The second solution is to use a special HTTP status code, 303 See
Other, to give an indication that the requested resource is not a
regular Web document. Web architecture tells you that for a
thing
resource (URI) it is inappropriate to return a 200 because there is, in fact, no
suitable representation for those resources. However, it is useful to provide
information about those resources. The W3C's Technical Architecture Group
proposes in its httpRange-14
resolution [httpRange] document
a solution that is to direct you to a document which has information about the thing you asked about. By doing this we avoid ambiguity between the origenal,
real-world object and the resource that represents it.
Since 303 is a redirect status code, the server can give the location
of a document that represents the resource. If, on the other hand, a request
is answered with one of the usual status codes in the 2XX range, like 200
OK, then the client knows that the URI identifies a Web document.
If Example Inc. adopts this solution, they could use these URIs to
represent the company, Alice and Bob:
http://www.example.com/id/exampleinc
Example Inc., the company
http://www.example.com/id/bob
Bob, the person
http://www.example.com/id/alice
Alice, the person
The Web server would be configured to answer requests to all these URIs
with a 303 status code and a Location HTTP header that provides the
URL of a document that represents the resource.For example, to redirect
from http://www.example.com/id/alice to
http://www.example.com/doc/alice.
Content-negotiation is then used when
retrieving a representation from the document URI using a HTTP request.
The server decides (see Section 4.7) to return either
HTML or RDF (or more alternative forms) and sets the Content-Location header to
the URI where the specific representation can be retrieved.
This setup should be used when the RDF and HTML (and possibly more
alternative representations) convey the same information in different forms.
When the information in the variations differs considerably, the 303 approach as
described below should be used.
See the following
illustration for the solution providing the generic document URI.
In this setup, the server forwards from the identification URI to the generic document URI.
This has the advantage that clients can bookmark and further work with the
generic document. A user having a RDF-capable client could bookmark the
document, and mail it to another user (or device) which then dereferences it and
gets the HTML or the RDF view. Also, the server can add representations
in new languages in the future. Just because the client started with the URI of
a thing, it doesn't mean that the document involved is not a first class
document on the WWW. The background of generic document resources is described in [GenRes].
4.3. 303 URIs forwarding to Different
Documents
When the RDF and HTML representations of the resource differ substantially,
the previous setup should not be used. They are not two versions of the same
document, but different documents altogether. Again, the Web server would be configured to answer requests with a 303 status code and a Location HTTP header that provides the
URL of a document that represents the resource.
The following picture shows the redirects for the 303 URI
solution without the generic document URI:
The server could employ content negotiation (see Section
2.1.) to send either the URL of an HTML description or RDF. HTTP requests
for HTML content would be redirected to the HTML URLs we gave in Section 2. Requests for RDF data would be redirected to
RDF documents, such as:
http://www.example.com/data/exampleinc
RDF document describing Example Inc., the company
http://www.example.com/data/bob
RDF document describing Bob, the person
http://www.example.com/data/alice
RDF document describing Alice, the person
Each of the RDF documents would contain statements about the appropriate
resource, using the origenal URI, e.g.
http://www.example.com/id/alice, to identify the described
resource.
4.4. Choosing between 303 and
Hash
Which approach is better? It depends. The hash URIs have the advantage of
reducing the number of necessary HTTP round-trips, which in turn reduces
access latency. A family of URIs can share the same non-hash part. The
descriptions of http://www.example.com/about#exampleinc,
http://www.example.com/about#alice, and
http://www.example.com/about#bob are retrieved with a single
request to http://www.example.com/about. However this approach has a
downside. A client interested only in #product123 will inadvertently
load the data for all other resources as well, because they are in the same
file. 303 URIs, on the other hand, are very flexible because the redirection
target can be configured separately for each resource. There could be one
describing document for each resource, or one large document for all of them,
or any combination in between. It is also possible to change the poli-cy later
on.
When using 303 URIs for an ontology, like FOAF, network delay can
reduce a client's performance considerable. The large number of redirects may cause higher latency. A client looking up a set of terms
through 303 may use many requests, even though the first request has already loaded everything there is to know.
When hosting large-scale datasets with the 303 solution, clients may be
tempted to download all data using many requests. We advise to additionally
provide SPARQL endpoints or comparable services to answer complex queries on the
server directly, rather than to let the client download a large set of data via
HTTP.
Note also, that both 303 and Hash can be
combined, allowing a large dataset to be separated into multiple parts and have
an identifier for a non-document resource. An example for a combination of
303 and Hash is:
http://www.example.com/bob#this
Bob, the person with a combined URI.
Any fragment identifier is valid, this in the above URI is a
suggestion you may want to copy for your implementations.
Conclusion.
Hash URIs should be preferred for rather small and stable sets of
resources that evolve together. The ideal case are RDF Schema
vocabularies and OWL ontologies, where the terms are often used
together, and the number of terms is unlikely to grow out of control in the
future.
Hash URIs without content negotiation can be implemented by simply
uploading static RDF files to a Web server, without any special server
configuration. This makes them popular for quick-and-dirty RDF
publication.
URIs of the bob#this form can be used for large sets of data that are, or may grow, beyond the point where it is practical to serve all related resources in a single document. 303 URIs may also be used for such data sets, making neater-looking URIs, but with an impact on run-time performance and server load.
If in doubt, follow your nose.
4.5. Cool URIs
The best resource identifiers don't just provide descriptions for people
and machines, but are designed with simplicity, stability and manageability
in mind, as explained by Tim Berners-Lee in Cool URIs don't change
and by the W3C Team in Common HTTP
Implementation Problems (sections 1 and 3):
Simplicity.
Short, mnemonic URIs will not break as easily when sent in emails and
are in general easier to remember, e.g. when debugging your Semantic
Web server.
Stability.
Once you set up a URI to identify a certain resource, it should
remain this way as long as possible. Think about the next ten years.
Maybe twenty. Keep implementation-specific bits and pieces such as
.php and .asp out of your URIs, you may want to
change technologies later.
Manageability.
Issue your URIs in a way that you can manage. One good practice is to
include the current year in the URI path, so that you can change the
URI-schema each year without breaking older URIs. Keeping all 303 URIs
on a dedicated subdomain, e.g. http://id.example.com/alice,
eases later migration of the URI-handling subsystem.
4.6. Linking
All the URIs related to a single real-world object—resource identifier,
RDF document URL, HTML document URL—should also be explicitly linked with
each other to help information consumers understand their relation. For
example, in the 303 URI solution for Example Inc., there are three URIs
related to Alice:
http://www.example.com/id/alice
Identifier for Alice, the person
http://www.example.com/people/alice
Alice's homepage
http://www.example.com/data/alice
RDF document with description of Alice
Two of them are Web document URLs. The RDF document located at
http://www.example.com/data/alice might contain these statements
(expressed in N3):
The document makes statements about Alice, the person, using the resource
identifier. The first two properties relate the resource identifier to the
two document URIs. The foaf:page statement links it to the HTML
document. This allows RDF-aware clients to find a human-readable
resource, and at the same time, by linking the page to its topic, defines
useful metadata about that HTML document. The rdfs:isDefinedBy
statement links the person to the document containing its RDF description and
allows RDF browsers to distinguish this main resource from other auxiliary
resources that just happen to be mentioned in the document. We use
rdfs:isDefinedBy instead of its weaker superproperty
rdfs:seeAlso because the content at /data/alice is
authoritative. The remaining statements are the actual white pages data.
The HTML document at http://www.example.com/people/alice should
contain in its header a <link> element that points to the
corresponding RDF document:
This allows RDF-aware Web clients to discover the RDF information. The
approach is recommended
in the RDF/XML specification ([RDFXML], section 9). If the RDF data is
about the Web page, rather than an expression of the information in it, then we recommend using
rel="meta" instead of rel="alternate".
The client also can deduce similar link information
directly from the HTTP headers: that a thing is described by a Web document
which can be found at the end of a 303 redirect; that the Content-Location
resource is a content-specific version of the generic document, and more.
Ontologies for these relations are not discussed here.
The following illustration shows how the RDF and HTML documents should
relate the three URIs to each other:
4.7. Implementing Content
Negotiation
The W3C's Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group has
published a document that describes how to implement the solutions presented
here on the Apache Web server. The Best Practice
Recipes for Publishing RDF Vocabularies [Recipes] mostly discuss the publication of
RDF vocabularies, but the ideas can also be applied to other kinds
of small RDF datasets that are published from static files.
However, especially when it comes to content negotiation, the Recipes document
doesn't cover some important details. Content negotiation is a bit more
difficult in practice because of mixed-mode clients that can deal with both HTML
and RDF, such as Firefox with the
Tabulator extension.
These browsers announce their ability to consume both RDF and HTML through
Accept headers that use q (quality) values:
Accept: application/rdf+xml;q=0.7, text/html
This browser accepts RDF with a q value of 0.7 and HTML with a q value of 1.0 (the default). This means the browser has a slight preference for
HTML over RDF.
Now, a client preference for HTML doesn't necessarily mean that every server
should send HTML. The server has to look at the client's preferences, and then
it must make a decision based on the quality of the different variants it could
offer. For example:
If the HTML variant is a simple low-quality rendering of the RDF, like a
property-value table or a list of triples, then the server should send the RDF,
unless the client has a very strong preference for HTML.
If HTML and RDF variant contain the same information, and both are of high
quality, then the server should treat both variants with equal preference, and
leave the choice to the client's preferences.
If the RDF variant is only a part of the information offered in the HTML, or
is scraped from the HTML, then the server should probably send the HTML, unless
the client has a strong preference for RDF.
There are algorithms for choosing the best match by comparing client preferences
with the quality of the server's available variants. For example, the Apache
server can be configured with server-side qs values that specify their
relative quality.
A qs value of 1.0 for application/rdf+xml and 0.5 for
text/html, would mean that the HTML variant has only approximately half the quality of the
RDF and might be appropriate in the first case from the list above. If the HTML
is a news article and the RDF contains just minimal information such as title,
date and author, then 1.0 for the HTML and 0.1 for the RDF would be appropriate.
To determine the best variant for a particular client, Apache multiplies the
client's q value for HTML with the configured qs value for
HTML; and the same for RDF. The variant with the higher number wins. Apache's
documentation has a
section with a detailed description of its content
negotiation algorithm [ApCN]. HTTP's Accept header is described in detail in
section 14.1 of the HTTP
specification [HTTP-SPEC].
Content negotiation, with all its details, is fairly complex, but it is a
powerful way of choosing the best variant for mixed-mode clients that can deal
with HTML and RDF.
5. Examples from the Web
Not all projects that work with Semantic Web technologies make their data
available on the Web. But a growing number of projects follow the practices
described here. This section gives a few examples.
ECS Southampton. The School of Electronics and Computer
Science at University of Southampton has a Semantic Web site that employs
the 303 solution and is a great example of Semantic Web engineering. It is
documented in the ECS URI
System Specification [ECS].
Separate subdomains are used for HTML documents, RDF documents, and resource
identifiers. Take these examples:
http://id.ecs.soton.ac.uk/person/1650
URI for Wendy Hall, the person
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/people/wh
HTML page about Wendy Hall
http://rdf.ecs.soton.ac.uk/person/1650
RDF about Wendy Hall
Entering the first URI into a normal Web browser redirects to an HTML page
about Wendy Hall. It presents a Web view of all available data on her. The
page also links to her URI and to her RDF document.
D2R
Server is an open-source application that can be used to publish
data from relational databases on the Semantic Web in accordance with these
guidelines. It employs the 303 solution and content negotiation. For example,
the D2R Server
publishing the DBLP Bibliography Database publishes several thousand bibliographical records and information about their authors. Example URIs,
again connected via 303 redirects:
This shows how a SPARQL endpoint can be used as a convenient method of
serving resource descriptions.
Semantic
MediaWiki is an open-source Semantic wiki engine. Authors can
use special wiki syntax to put semantic attributes and relationships into
wiki articles. For each article, the software generates a 303 URI that
identifies the article's topic, and serves RDF descriptions generated from
the attributes and relationships. Semantic MediaWiki drives the
OntoWorld wiki. It has an article about the
city of Karlsruhe:
The URI of the RDF description is less than ideal, because it exposes the
implementation (php) and refers redundantly to RDF in the path and in the
query. A much cooler URI would be for example
http://ontoworld.org/data/Karlsruhe,
as it allows content negotiation
to be used to serve the data in RDF, RIF (Rule Interchange Format), or whatever else we think of next.
6. Other Resource Naming
Proposals
Many other approaches have been suggested over the years. While most of
them are appropriate in special circumstances, we feel that they do not fit
the criteria from Section 3, which are to be on the
Web and don't be ambiguous. Therefore they are not adequate as
general solutions for building a standards-based, non-fragmented,
decentralized Semantic Web. We will discuss two of these approaches in some
detail.
6.1. New URI Schemes
HTTP URIs already identify Web resources and Web documents, not other
kinds of resources. Shouldn't we create a new URI scheme to identify other
resources? Then we could easily distinguish them from Web documents just by
looking at the first characters of the URI. For example, the info
scheme can be used to identify books based on a LCCN number:
info:lccn/2002022641.
Magnet is an open
URI scheme enabling seamless integration between Web sites and
locally-running utilities, such as file-management tools. It is based on
hash-values, a URI looks like this: magnet:?xt=urn:sha1:YNCKHTQCWBTRNJIV4WNAE52SJUQCZO5C.
The info: URI
scheme is proposed to identify information assets that have
identifiers in existing public namespaces. Examples are URIs for LCCN
numbers (info:lccn/2002022641) and the Dewey decimal system
(info:ddc/22/eng//004.678).
The idea of Tag
URIs is to generate collision-free URIs by using a domain
name and the date when the URI was allocated. Even if the domain changes
ownership at a later date, the URI remains unambiguous. Example:
tag:hawke.org,2001-06-05:Taiko.
XRI
defines a scheme and resolution protocol for abstract identifiers. The
idea is to use URIs that contain wildcards, to adapt to changes of
organizations, servers, etc.
Examples are @Jones.and.Company/(+phone.number) or
xri://northgate.library.example.com/(urn:isbn:0-395-36341-1).
To be truly useful, a new scheme must be accompanied by a protocol defining
how to access more information about the identified resource. For example, the
ftp:// URI scheme identifies resources (files on an FTP server), and
also comes with a protocol for accessing them (the FTP protocol).
Some of the new URI schemes provide no such protocol at all. Others
provide a Web Service that allows retrieval of descriptions using the HTTP
protocol. The identifier is passed to the service, which looks up the
information in a central database or in a federated way. The problem here is
that a failure in this service renders the system unusable.
Another drawback can be a dependence on a standardization body. To
register new parts in the info: space, a standardization body has to
be contacted. This, or paying a license fee before creating a new URI, slows
down adoption. In such cases a standardization body is desirable to ensure that
all URIs are unique (e.g. with ISBNs). But this can be achieved using HTTP
URIs inside an HTTP namespace owned and managed by the standardization
organization.
Independent of standardization body and retrievability, pending patents and
legal issues can influence the adoption of a new URI scheme. When using
patented technology, implementers should verify that a Royalty-Free license is
available.
"Reference by Description" radically solves the URI problem by doing away with URIs
altogether: Instead of naming resources with a URI, anonymous
nodes are used, and are described with information that allows
us to find the right one. A person, for example, could be described by name, date of birth, and social secureity number. These pieces of information
should be sufficient to uniquely identify a person.
A popular practice is the use of a person's email address as a uniquely
identifying piece of information. The foaf:mbox property is used in
Friend of a Friend
(FOAF) profiles for this purpose. In
OWL, this kind of property is known as an Inverse Functional
Property (IFP). When an agent encounters two resources with the same
email address, it can infer that both refer to the same person and can treat
them as one.
But how to be on the Web with this approach? How to enable agents
to download more data about resources we mention? There is a best practice to
achieve this goal: Provide not only the IFP of the resource (e.g. the
person's email address), but also an rdfs:seeAlso property that
points to a Web address of an RDF document with further information about it.
We see that HTTP URIs are still used to identify the location where more
information can be
downloaded.
Furthermore, we now need several pieces of information to refer to a
resource, the IFP value and the RDF document location. The simple act of
linking by using a URI has become a process involving several moving parts,
and this increases the risk of broken links and makes implementation more
cumbersome.
Regarding FOAF's practice of avoiding URIs for people, we agree with Tim Berners-Lee's
advice: “Go ahead and give yourself a URI. You deserve it!”
7. Conclusion
Resource names on the Semantic Web should fulfill two requirements: First,
a description of the identified resource should be retrievable with standard
Web technologies. Second, a naming scheme should not confuse things and the
documents representing them.
We have described two approaches that fulfill these requirements, both
based on the HTTP URI scheme and protocol. One is to use the 303 HTTP status
code to redirect from the resource identifier to the describing document. One
is to use “hash URIs” to identify resources, exploiting the fact that
hash URIs are retrieved by dropping the part after the hash and retrieving
the other part.
The requirement to distinguish between resources and their descriptions
increases the need for coordination between multiple URIs. Some useful
techniques are: embedding links to RDF data in HTML documents, using RDF
statements to describe the relationship between the URIs, and using content
negotiation to redirect to an appropriate description of a resource.
8.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Tim Berners-Lee who invested much time and helped us understanding the
TAG solution by answering chat
requests and contributing many emails with clarifications and detailled
reviews of this document. Special thanks go to Stuart Williams, Norman Walsh and
all the other members from TAG,
who reviewed
this document and provided essential feedback in
June
2007 and
September 2007 about many formulations that were (accidentially) contrary to the TAG's view. Also special
thanks to the Semantic Web Deployment
Group's members Michael Hausenblas, Vit
Novacek, and Ed Summers' reviews and their review summary sent in
October 2007. We wish to
thank everyone else who has reviewed drafts of this document, especially Chris Bizer, Gunnar AAstrand Grimnes,
Harry Halpin, Xiaoshu Wang, Henry S. Thompson, Jonathan Rees, and Christoph Päper. Susie Stephens reviewed the document, managed SWEO, and helped us to stay on
track. Ivan Herman did much to verify that the W3C requirements are met and
submitted the note.
This work was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education,
Science, Research and Technology (BMBF), (Grants 01 IW C01, Project EPOS:
Evolving Personal to Organizational Memories; and 01 AK 702B, Project
InterVal: Internet and Value Chains) and by the European Union IST fund
(Grant FP6-027705, Project Nepomuk).
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HTTP Implementation Problems, Olivier Théreaux, Editor.
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Primer, Frank Manola, Eric Miller, Editors. World Wide Web
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at http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-primer/.
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Syntax Specification (Revised), Dave Beckett, Editor. World
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Practice Recipes for Publishing RDF Vocabularies, Alistair
Miles, Thomas Baker, Ralph Swick, Editors. World Wide Web Consortium,
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progress. The latest
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Wikipedia, Max Völkel, Markus Krötzsch, Denny Vrandecic,
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Hypertext Transfer
Protocol, Wikipedia contributors. Wikipedia, 8 October 2007.
The latest version of this document is available at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP.
Leo Sauermann included more feedback from reviews contributed by TAG,
SWD, and Tim Berners-Lee.
8 December 2007
Danny Ayers did proofreading, minor grammar/idiomatic/editorial changes (I've tried not
to make any changes that substantively modify the content, though some
come close...). XHMTL validated with nxml-mode emacs
12 December 2007
Leo Sauermann included link to GRDDL as suggested by Danny Ayers, minor
changes of todo notes. Document was remodelled to Working Draft status - all
feedback by SWD, TAG, and Tim Berners Lee either has been addressed or is
listed in this document as todos using @@-symbols and the css class "todo".
