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On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 3:47 AM, Ben Companjen <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > The URIs you gave get me to webpages *about* the Declaration of > Independence. I'm sure it's just a copy/paste mistake, but in this context > you want the exact right URIs of course. And by "better" I guess you meant > "probably more widely used" and "probably longer lasting"? :) > > LOC URI for the DoI (the work) is without .html: > http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n79029194 > > VIAF URI for the DoI is without trailing /: > http://viaf.org/viaf/179420344 Thanks for that Ben. IMHO it's (yet another) illustration of why the W3C's approach to educating the world about URIs for real world things hasn't quite caught on, while RESTful ones (promoted by the IETF) have. If someone as knowledgeable as Karen can do that, what does it say about our ability as practitioners to use URIs this way, and in our ability to write software to do it as well? In a REST world, when you get a 200 OK it doesn't mean the resource is a Web Document. The resource can be anything, you just happened to successfully get a representation of it. If you like you can provide hints about the nature of the resource in the representation, but the resource itself never goes over the wire, the representation does. It's a subtle but important difference in two ways of looking at Web architecture. If you find yourself interested in making up your own mind about this you can find the RESTful definitions of resource and representation in the IETF HTTP RFCs, most recently as of a few weeks ago in draft [1]. You can find language about Web Documents (or at least its more recent variant, Information Resource) in the W3C's Architecture of the World Wide Web [2]. Obviously I'm biased towards the IETF's position on this. This is just my personal opinion from my experience as a Web developer trying to explain Linked Data to practitioners, looking at the Web we have, and chatting with good friends who weren't afraid to tell me what they thought. //Ed [1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-httpbis-p2-semantics-24#page-7 [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#id-resources