Sorry, I broke some URIs
By kjetilk. Tuesday, 30. May 2006, 14:10:47
Since the launch of the Opera Community in September 2005, all members of the community has had an URI identifying them. Having URIs for everything is important, and even though you can't be retrieved over the network the URI is useful to identify you as a person.
Furthermore, we know that Cool URIs don't change, but I'm afraid I just changed them...
You see, the final, little part of the URI I gave you was very badly designed. It had a lot of unnecessary complexity, and with complexity comes bugs, and in fact, it turned out that some of them weren't even valid, since I hadn't taken into account that some usernames begin with a number.
It wasn't with a very light heart that I changed the URIs, but as I discussed this with other members of the FOAF community, it was clear that it was better to do it now, and deal with any problems that may occur with a process known as smushing, than dealing with the complexity that I had, especially as more people start using the URIs for real applications.
For most users, this change will not mean anything. The usual FOAF tools continue to work, it is only if someone has been indexing the URIs it will have any impact. I don't know if anyone has been doing that, but I would be interested in hearing about it!
UPDATE: I was a bit uneasy about this, so I found a way to at least attempt to unbreak most of the URIs, by using the sameAs property from OWL on those valid fragment identifiers from the previous version. That should give us the best of both worlds!
Furthermore, we know that Cool URIs don't change, but I'm afraid I just changed them...
You see, the final, little part of the URI I gave you was very badly designed. It had a lot of unnecessary complexity, and with complexity comes bugs, and in fact, it turned out that some of them weren't even valid, since I hadn't taken into account that some usernames begin with a number. It wasn't with a very light heart that I changed the URIs, but as I discussed this with other members of the FOAF community, it was clear that it was better to do it now, and deal with any problems that may occur with a process known as smushing, than dealing with the complexity that I had, especially as more people start using the URIs for real applications.
For most users, this change will not mean anything. The usual FOAF tools continue to work, it is only if someone has been indexing the URIs it will have any impact. I don't know if anyone has been doing that, but I would be interested in hearing about it!
UPDATE: I was a bit uneasy about this, so I found a way to at least attempt to unbreak most of the URIs, by using the sameAs property from OWL on those valid fragment identifiers from the previous version. That should give us the best of both worlds!
