[uf-discuss] format for identifiers?

[Ryan King]

On Nov 23, 2005, at 1:09 PM, David Osolkowski wrote:

> I think the question might have been misread.  I understood the  
> question to
> be, "is there or should there be a microformat for indicating that  
> something
> IS an identifier", as opposed to "is there or should there be a  
> microformat
> FOR identifiers".  E.g. given the string "urn:isbn:<whatever>",  
> indicating
> that that string represents an identifier.

I don't believe the question was misread. Tantek's point was that  
there's no need for a microformat, we already have it covered with URIs.

> I would suggest that the point of the identifier is that it  
> represents some
> resource, and merely marking up a string as being an identifier  
> doesn't
> accomplish much without being able to dereference it and obtain the  
> resource
> it identifies.

So, you're saying URIs are only useful when they're URIs?


> Saying "urn:isbn:<whatever>" is an identifier doesn't do
> much good; the point is that given that identifier, I can tell that  
> it's
> talking about a book and I can go obtain information about that  
> book.  In
> which case, a href="" comes to mind.  I think there's room for some  
> debate
> here.

I'm not sure what use case you're going at here.

> - David
>
> On 11/23/05, Tantek Çelik <tantek at cs.stanford.edu> wrote:
>>
>> Hello C. Hudley, welcome to the list!
>>
>> On 11/23/05 9:54 AM, "C. Hudley" <chudley at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Has any work been done on a format for identifiers?  By  
>>> "identifier" I
>>> mean "some kind of arbitrary string that identifies the object at  
>>> hand
>>> in some system".  Examples of the kinds of identifiers that might be
>>> in scope would be ISBNs for books, PMIDs for pubmed, node ids for
>>> weblog entries, DOIs for journal articles, flickr ids for flickr
>>> images, etc.

BTW, see http://www.iana.org/assignments/uri-schemes and http:// 
www.iana.org/assignments/urn-namespaces, which have schemes and  
namesspaced for most of the things you list above.

-ryan


--
Ryan King
ryan at technorati.com