"uid" microformats? (was Re: [uf-discuss] ISBN mark-up)

[Bruce D'Arcus]

On 4/24/06, Tantek Çelik <tantek at cs.stanford.edu> wrote:

> Third, I actually see disadvantages in using URIs as a basic unit rather
> than URLs.  URLs are far more useful in that they assert you can go get this
> thing, it has a location, most likely on the Web.  Thus as a pattern we
> should use URLs in microformats, not URIs.

I have no strong opinion on the general issue of "uid" vs. "uri"; was
just raising what I think might be an important question.

But I do disagree with the above. Ids like isbns and asins are used to
refer to abstract concepts (books, and audiovisual works*
respectively), so it's rather meaningless to assert that you can grab
such a thing from any one location. Yes, a book might be available at
Amazon, but it's also available in thousands of other locations.
Likewise with dois, which might resolve to different locations
depending on various factors.

There are some library hackers (Dan Chudnov et al) doing some
interesting work with proxies that take standardized uris of this sort
and then, depending on the prefixes, grab the associated metadata from
the approprirate service (pubmed, Amazon, Flickr, etc.).  I believe
that this question in part was connected to that sort of work, since
Ed is involved in that.

Bruce

* for more on the notion of "works" and abstraction, see FRBR
<http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/frbr/frbr.htm>.