URN better than URL for networked services (Was: Re: UWS as a REST protocol

[Brian Thomas]

On Tuesday 27 February 2007 6:50:50 am Guy Rixon wrote:
> it's possible to define a RESTful interface to VOSpace services, and, by
> extension to VOSpace nodes. However, if the identifier for a VOSpace node is
> http://mumble.mumble/... then it's tided to some specific site-name. The
> vos:// notation lets us move the node transparently to a different host (or,
> at least it lets us move the _space_; maybe not individual nodes); we can't do
> this with http:// URIs except by DNS trickery.

Right, so what you are recommending is using that sub-category of URI, the 'URN'
which explicitly is mean to not point at any location, anywheres. Look up in
the registry would provide the (current) URL to the actual location. I agree this
is desirable as its less fragile than 'hard-wiring' to the URL (hard to build a web of
interrelated services using URL's that wont break after some small time passes
because one or more of the service providers refactors their service URL for 
whatever reason without letting the others know about it).

Regards,

=brian