John Cowan wrote:

> Misha Wolf scripsit:
>
> > As we would very strongly prefer to end up with a Web page per
> > Taxonomy,
>
> Is that really sensible when taxonomies are very large? Consider
> SNOMED-CT, with upwards of 300,000 terms. I should think that
> the choice of / vs. # should be allowed to depend on the taxonomy
> in use.

Well, there are two options for URI construction:

a) use simple concatenation of taxonomy URI and code,

b) require that a specified string be injected between the taxonomy
URI and the code.

I agree with David Booth that consuming programs shouldn't have to
contain hardwired knowledge of the rules for each taxonomy. I'm not
sure, though, that there exists a viable mechanism for telling a
program which of the above to do, for each of the hundreds of
taxonomies used for News. I haven't looked at GRDDL for some time,
but I seem to recall that it is designed for interpreting document
instances, so is probably not the right tool for specifying how to
handle a taxonomy that will be used by millions of documents. I
also don't recall such a capability in RDDL, though I haven't looked
at it, too, for quite some time.

So if we limited ourselves to one rule only, and if we wanted to
support the use of both "#" and "/", we would probbaly have to go
for simple concatenation and specify that in cases where any of the
codes would not be legal fragment IDs, the taxonomy URI must end
with a character which will sanitise the code. This approach is
illustrated by choices 1 and 2 in my previous mail:

1. Simple concatenation using "/" as the delimiter
"http://www.iptc.org/NewsCodes/" & "123456" ->
"http://www.iptc.org/NewsCodes/123456"

2. Simple concatenation using "#_" as the delimiter
"http://www.iptc.org/NewsCodes#_" & "123456" ->
"http://www.iptc.org/NewsCodes#_123456"

One of the disadvantages is that a number of RDF tools can't cope
with choice 2. At any rate, this seemed to be the case when I last
looked into this matter.

Misha Wolf
News Standards Manager, Reuters, http://www.reuters.com/
Vice Chair, News Architecture WP, IPTC, http://www.iptc.org/

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