I’ve spent much of the day trawling through the list of resources that JISC provided in the briefing paper for the Information Environment programme call last year (i.e. the programme that is funding this project). There’s a lot of really well articulated and useful reports and blog posts that have been written over the last few years, but having reached the end of the list, it feels to me like there’s been a lot of repetition, too, and it can be summarised by the following:
- Know your domain
- URIs have a value that can be manipulated. Hardly anyone in an organisation understands this. That’s OK.
- Make the Web human. URIs should speak to us, in a language that people can interpret and understand.
- Persistence is relative. Society, institutions, people and our relationships change. The web is entropic in the long run. Get over it!
- Linked Data is common sense and fundamentally trivial.
- All recommendations lead back to Cool URIs
Right now, my own thinking about this project is that we simply have to articulate Cool URIs in a way that is meaningful and useful to our organisation. That’s all. The manifesto and technical specification have been written.