Linked Data Patterns – New Draft – Leigh Dobbs and Ian Davis have released a new draft.
From the website:
A pattern catalogue for modelling, publishing, and consuming Linked Data.
Think of it as Linked Data without all the Put your hand on your computer and feel the power of URI stuff you hear in some quarters.
For example, the solution for for How do we publish non-global identifiers in RDF? is:
Create a custom property, as a sub-class of the dc:identifier property for relating the existing literal key value with the resource.
And the discussion reads:
While hackable URIs are a useful short-cut they don’t address all common circumstances. For example different departments within an organization may have different non-global identifiers for a resource; or the process and format for those identifiers may change over time. The ability to algorithmically derive a URI is useful but limiting in a global sense as knowledge of the algorithm has to be published separately to the data.
By publishing the original “raw” identifier as a literal property of the resource we allow systems to look-up the URI for the associated resource using a simple SPARQL query. If multiple identifiers have been created for a resource, or additional identifiers assigned over time, then these can be added as additional repeated properties.
For systems that may need to bridge between the Linked Data and non-Linked Data views of the world, e.g. integrating with legacy applications and databases that do not store the URI, then the ability to find the identifier for the resource provides a useful integration step.
If I aggregate the non-Linked Data identifiers as sub-classes of dc:identifier, isn’t that a useful integration step whether I am using Linked Data or not?
The act of aggregating identifiers is a useful integration step, by whatever syntax. Yes?
My principal disagreement with Linked Data and other “universal” identification systems is that none of them are truly universal or long lasting. Rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding.