uris schmuris

Unlike wikis and del.icio.us which use simple words to connect pieces of information, the Semantic Web proposes to use URIs so that you really know when two people mean the same thing.

Phil Dawes echoes my feelings on this design issue:

I still think the RDF people have got it wrong with URIs, and so far nobody’s convinced me otherwise.

My (same old) argument: URIs are bad for large-scale interoperability. The alternative: just use words and symbols occuring in real life, and use the context inherent in the communication to disambiguate meaning.

However, I have been wrong about Tim Berners-Lee's designs before, and give him the benefit of doubt this time: after developing web apps in the Web 1.0 era, I became completely frustrated with the web, and never wanted to use it again for applications, until I saw apps like del.icio.us and GMail, and Bruno Haid showed me an early demo of a System One prototype in the then empty Innsbruck office.

Maybe the rel-tag microformat can be the missing link that bridges the word and URI worlds. With rel-tag, the URL http://del.icio.us/tag/foo can be treated both as a URI, and the word "foo".