Barcamp session:  URI persistance and the future of the working group

Introductions

Stuart Williams – epimorphics – URI guidance; registers
Hadley Beeman – LinkedGov, UK government
Hans Overbeek – URI strategy dutch 
Christophe Guéret
Shuichi
Eduardo Colombo – Polytechnic University of Milan
Madi Solomon  - Pearson
Jim King, adobe.  Trying to learn more about this field. Acquired Omniture: annotates web pages, ping a server. They collect terabytes of web access info.  If Macy's wants help with their website, Omniture does it but the data is hosted by and owned by Macy's.  We are the largest company for gathering what happends on websites.  To tune it and personalise content. 
We could close the loop: use our software to desing webpages, analyse the activity and revise the web pages.  Adobe and ODI are discussing this. - they hold it but don't own it.
Fumihiro Kato – Japan.  Intersted in Schema
Thijs Berntjens – Netherlands URI strategy.  Geospacial standard
Bob Schloss – IBM.  IBM also has Unica and Cormetrics to do the same thing, also have tons of data.  We are open sourcing tomorrow ISMP (intelligence semantic model palate) a set of concepts, data structures and relationships for any event, location, measurement, job role, asset type, etc that any city agency, city business or utility would care about.  From existing data standards in many places (OASIS, Open GeoSpacial, etc), boiled down to something you can understand in 90 minutes, validated against existing cities (Washington DC, NY, Singapore)
github /bschloss/
Bhyland: is this like schema.org?
Bob:  We're not like those companies.
Bhyland: entrepreneur with the US gov, high-value data on facilities, human health and the environment. Callimachus (open source tool).  Interest:  continuity between the existing working group... but more broadly what happens next.  How wide.
...Linked Data Platforms WG is much more enterprise-focused.
Hayo Schreijer – dutch gov minister of interior.

Agenda:  1. Persistence and construction
2.  Future of the field/working groups

Bhyland:  type of best practice... Many can't be tested for conformance.  Therefore, those are going into a note.  But it's needed, the namespace would be useful.  Any other input documents?
Stuart and Hans:  The ISA paper
Bhyland:  
Stuart:  the BBC might have useful stuff... formalised?  Programmes ontology stuff?  “House styles” to look for.
Hayo:  Eu identifiers – legislation, case law.  ECLI standards, European Legislation Identifiers ELI standards.  
Hans: (they are URNs)
PhilA: Those are HTTP URIs, in ELIs.  The document says this is what you should do, doesn't force implementation.
Bhyland: OCLC produced an open source piece of software in mid90s called PURLs.  Not the open source community, nor the advertising community's trademarked term for personal URLs.  We run a PURL service for the US government, at the Library of Congress.  They monitor 404s.  Social agreements written around the use of them.  So there's the policy part (tailored to country or locality), theen there's the implementation part (servers, creation of URL), and then there's the human side (checking 404s, resolving problems)
Hans: we were suggesting that pattern.  JeniT has mentioned that the persistence of data.gov.uk URI are in jeopardy because of rebranding.  We can write persistence into the law.
Bhyland: Top level domains 
Stuart:  in the Cabinet Office, we have the citizen portal (gov.uk) and we have the data portal (data.gov.uk)  Different factions.
We've been having trouble with a multi-tenanted domain space.  Unless you have the governance structure in place,...  The idealistic view was that there would be a stakeholder group putting governance in for the sector.  But the practicalities of that – too many people and different data publication/refresh cycles.  We'd like to introduce a bit more path structure, to enable sub-delegation.
Hans: after the slash?
Stuart:  No, before
Hans: We're doing something similar.
Bhyland:  There are 10-20 people in the world who understand the nuances of running a multi-tenanted domain. 
Stuart:  Our bathing water data sits under environment.data.gov.uk.  Another topic of data there would have to find a way to start a conversation to co-ordinate that, work out the permissions.
Bhyland:  that's a working group.  Working this out is the work of a working group.
Bob: After the beginning of the Internet, Vint Cerf and TimBL and Bob Hahn (in Washington DC) when different ways.  They worked on persistent handles.  The nations we have in 10 years will not be the same as we have now.
Stuart:  We also have trading funds, who worry about things like brands.  Ordnance Survey is an example.  They would not publish under a URI that doesn't have their name.
Christophe:  Should a working group consider web-ID in this?  Put the authority of the person in the URI of the data itself?
Stuart:  URI is a hint.
Phil: WE should be careful about piling things on WebID. 
... People design URLs carefully, to tell you something.  With patterns.  Inferences. 
Bhyland: You know that's not a best practice.
Stuart:  they're a social artifact.
Bob: to have actual use within a year, you need the right stakeholders. Re ELIs: Until you have the people who write the software to use them, it won't happen.  I'm answering the question “is government too narrow”
Better to do cross-government, and include NGOs etc. That's where the energy is.
Hadley:  Since we're planning for the future, we should not limit ourselves by who is in the room.  We should work out the problem and then get the right people in the room.
Stuart: Whether gov and industries can rely other others... is a concern.
Bob:  We want to have a continuity between old world and new world: can do that by demonstrating automatic mapping the old way to the new way. Hack for a month to demonstrate it.  Get buy-in that way.
Bhyland: The US government is short on resources.  IBM is an exception because they're active, but most of the advice is coming from experts in small companies.  Big pharma, healthcare, life sciences is already doing it.  Publishing is getting on the bandwagon.  This is NOT a research project.
Stuart:  Forever is a long time.  Change is inevitable; plan for it.  In terms of publishing URI sets, set some expectations.  How long are they good for.  Make that commitment. Metadata is key on that.  John Sheridan said once can name things, have that artefact, it can then be part of an obligation enshrined in a procurement cycle.  Then you can frame persistence in terms of 5-7 years (tendering cycle).
Christophe:  In DCAT or VoiD, describing a dataset – how long you expect it to be stable.  Maybe it should be done in collaboration in companies, choosing the appropriate time span.
Bhyland:  structures around federation, archiving... there's precedent in this.  The W3 has a lot of expertise in this, because a lot of companies are 

Shuichi: Problem: URLs depend on DNS, which depends on region/country.  Should we create another independent domain name system for data?
Bhyland:  Even with peer-reviewed guidance to eliminate conflicts of interest - that's a valuable role.  I've seen someone in government make a big decision about a vendor choose a supplier held at the whims of venture capitalists.
Hans:  that's a problem when your'e talking about getting the right people into the room...  they look at our URIs as something to put on a bus. Branding.  Marketing.  What we're doing is different.
Christophe:  I'm working a different domain system for data.  Research project funded by Verisign. ERS Entity Registry System.  Anyone can contribute to a system of a URN.  Collaboration between Switzerland.
Hayo:  We need not only gov but markets and scientists on board.  Also, in the Netherlands we solved the legislation URI issue 5 years ago by agreeing not to use domain names but to use unique identifiers, set by the gov, and then user can get the data from multiple domains/suppliers.  In their own structures.
Hans:  Like the BBC presentation using DBpedia identifiers.
Hayo:  We have Juriconnect, best practice on this.  Made my linked data project possible.  Industry, gov and accountants.
Fumihiro: Sometimes it's difficult to map codes to URIs.  The codes may change.