Daniel’s Blog

There was a little discussion the other day about how to decode a URI. Here is my opinion on decoding a URI.

Here is an example URI:

http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card#i

The question as asked, what do you call the bit before the hash and the bit after the hash.

Tim Berners-Lees answer was: “After the hash, I like localname or localid”

Which does indeed make sense, but we might be able to come up with something better.

Another answer on the IRC was: “branch/leaf”, descriptive and also a good naming solution, but the tree synonym is used so much in the computing industry.

My decoding:

This bit (before the hash #):

http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card

I call the “space”

and this bit (after the hash #):

i

I call the “identity”

I feel that space and identity actually fit it perfectly. You have a particular space where you define your object, it is within your data/domain space. You then have an identity, literally being the object that we are talking about.

Any thoughts? Maybe you have a good suggestion?

Thank you,

Daniel

Technorati Tags: uri, rdf, identity, dataspace

[UPDATE date=”6th December 2007″]

I forgot to actually explain the reason I feel that “space” and “identity” actually fit perfectly.

Within the Data Web, an objects/resources identity is separate from the location it is in… this is the difference between URI and URL. The URI is a resources identity, whereas a URL is simply a location.

You can now see that before that hash in the URI, it is the space for meaningful data to reside and after the hash it is the true identity of a particular resource.

Kingsley Idehen has tried to explain this before:

• Fourth Platform: Data Spaces in The Cloud
• Semantic Web Data Spaces
• Data Spaces and Web of Databases
• and many more

The W3C have more information about URIs and URLs if you want to know more.
[/UPDATE]