The Problem With Names by Paul Miller.
Paul details the struggle of museums to make their holdings web accessible.
The problem isn’t reluctance or a host of other issues that Paul points out.
The problem is one of identifiers, that is, names.
Museums have crafted complex identifiers for their holdings and not unreasonably expect to continue to use them.
But all they are being offered are links.
The Rijksmuseum is one of several museums around the world that is actively and enthusiastically working to open up its data, so that it may be used, enjoyed, and enriched by a whole new audience. But until some of the core infrastructure — the names, the identifiers, the terminologies, and the concepts — upon which this and other museums depend becomes truly part of the web, far too much of the opportunity created by big data releases such as the Rijksmuseum’s will be wasted.
When is the W3C going to admit that subjects can have complex names/identifiers? Not just simple links?
That would be a game changer. For everyone.