Comments on: Speaking and writing webscale identifiers

By: Fear not, book lovers. The future of marginalia is bright! « Jon Udell

Fear not, book lovers. The future of marginalia is bright! « Jon Udell — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 18:57:16 +0000

[...] the web shows how it can be done. There are, for example, a variety of ways to refer to a work. There’s no consensus as to which is best, and poor interoperability among the various [...]

By: Where is the money going? « Jon Udell

Where is the money going? « Jon Udell — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:13:16 +0000

[...] starting point. Every award is identified by an award number. These are, effectively, webscale identifiers — that is, more-or-less unique tags we could use to collate newspaper articles, blog entries, [...]

By: Jon Udell

Jon Udell — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:52:38 +0000

groundbreaking scholarship being done regards the semitic-web

[Chuckle] OK, done.

By: Andrew Gilmartin

Andrew Gilmartin — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:13:49 +0000

John, would you please change “semitic-web” to “semantic-web”. I am sure there is much groundbreaking scholarship being done regards the semitic-web but I really wanted to reference the semantic-web work. The other typos can stay.

By: JXL87

JXL87 — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 18:23:05 +0000

Thanks for the link to the long one. ,

By: Jon Udell

Jon Udell — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 02:35:44 +0000

> The core of the problem is not coming up
> with another identification system but
> coming up with a identification relationship
> system.

I agree. And that is (not coincidentally) why I’ve been talking to Kingsley Idehen and Stefano Mazzocchi about that:

http://blog.jonudell.net/2009/09/28/talking-with-stefano-mazzocchi-about-reconciling-web-naming-systems/

http://blog.jonudell.net/2009/09/09/talking-with-kingsley-idehen-about-mastering-your-own-search-index/

By: Andrew Gilmartin

Andrew Gilmartin — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 17:47:56 +0000

Adding content hints to identifiers degrades into the case where you have several variations of the identifiers in the wild. For automation to help us it needs to which identifiers are for the same thing. If all identifiers used the same syntax then it would be possible to automatically do this. Using the same syntax does not seem likely to happen given the number of global identification systems we already have, eg Handle (http://www.handle.net/rfc/rfc3650.html), DOI, URL, ISSN, ISBN, LOC, etc…

The core of the problem is not coming up with another identification system but coming up with a identification relationship system. This would address not only the same thing with multiple identifiers but also the relationships of parts to whole and variations, such as revisions or translations. Let’s work on that for a while (independent of the larger semantic-web stuff).

By: Mohan Arun L

Mohan Arun L — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 14:41:05 +0000

Facebook has been using profileIDs (long digits of numbers) to identify people, so when you sign up for FB by default you end up with a long URL like
facebook.com/profile.php?id=12345678, which obviously you cant pass around to other people or even remember or recall it.
Then you had to go into settings and do somethings to get an url like
facebook.com/myname
On the other hand myspace has always been providing urls of the form
myspace.com/myname

By: Jon Udell

Jon Udell — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:13:53 +0000

> but there is some naming starting to appear

Yes. As Gavin Bell noted, it’s the Amazon approach which combines an opaque ID and readable slug.

So far, the id is promoted only for developers:

/programmes/:groupPID/episodes/upcoming
/programmes/:groupPID/episodes/upcoming/debut
/programmes/:groupPID/episodes/player

“To access these add .xml, .json or .yaml to the end of the url.”

However it can be used to find a cluster of related things:

http://elmcity.info/doublesearch/?q=b00fl9sw

And the ID finds more things than the name:

http://elmcity.info/doublesearch/?q=A_History_of_Scotland_Hammers_of_the_Scots

Interestingly, neither finds anything on the BBC site:

http://search.bbc.co.uk/search?go=homepage&scope=all&q=A_History_of_Scotland_Hammers_of_the_Scots&Search=Search

http://search.bbc.co.uk/search?go=homepage&scope=all&q=b00fl9sw&Search=Search

By: Tony Hirst

Tony Hirst — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 12:42:16 +0000

I haven’t explored what’s ben going on with BBC URIs, but there is some naming starting to appear…

eg http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00fl9sw/A_History_of_Scotland_Hammers_of_the_Scots/