Multi-conference report: VO and SW

[Tony Linde]

> I would appreciate an elaboration of why it ivo: is bad. It 

I think it isn't Norman saying this but the W3C. See his section
http://nxg.me.uk/note/2005/vo-and-sw/#dcc. They're simply saying that a
proliferation of naming schemes is bad practice, presumably because only
those in the know can interpret those naming schemes - they aren't globally
interpretable.

Personally, it doesn't worry me because a) our URI scheme generally follows
the guidelines for naming; b) as is pointed out, plenty of others are doing
the same; c) we also provide DC standard details so the metadata is globally
available even if the data isn't; d) no one but an astronomer could possibly
interpret our resources anyway and they'll all be 'in the know'.

Cheers,
Tony. 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-semantics at eso.org 
> [mailto:owner-semantics at eso.org] On Behalf Of roy at cacr.caltech.edu
> Sent: 04 December 2005 22:58
> To: norman at astro.gla.ac.uk
> Cc: semantics at ivoa.net
> Subject: Re: Multi-conference report: VO and SW
> 
> Norman
> 
> I think this thing that you call out as bad practice was my idea:
> 
> "We don't seem to be doing anything that stands out as Bad 
> Practice, with the possible exception of the proposed ivo: 
> URI scheme."
> 
> I would appreciate an elaboration of why it ivo: is bad. It 
> would seem to me that the prefix http: means Hypertext 
> transfer protocol (that's what I grew up with anyway), and 
> that our identifiers are definitively NOT that.
> I really dislike this practice of making non-URLs look like 
> URLs, it is confusing.
> 
> Therefore I pushed to have a scheme so that it is quite clear 
> that this is not a URL. In fact, the thing you can do is 
> resolve it with an IVOA registry and ivo: makes that clear.
> 
> Another example is the XML namespace. This is a silly name for it:
> http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance. I would suggest 
> that xmlns://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance would be better.
> 
> It reminds me of how Native Americans are sometimes called 
> Indians, which is immediately followed by an explanation that 
> they are not from India.
> 
> Thank you
> Roy
> 
> 
>