URI-based Naming Systems for Science

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Authors’ Draft 23 May 2008

This version:

2008-05-23 16:26:06 -0400

Current version:

http://purl.org/science/report/uris-for-science

Authors:

Jonathan Rees, Science Commons

Alan Ruttenberg, Science Commons

Copyright © 2008 Creative Commons Corp.. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License except where otherwise noted.

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Abstract

Formal nomenclature is essential to scientific communication because of the importance of clearly specifying the entities under discussion. It takes on additional importance as computational agents are brought in to help marshal and process the enormous amount of information available to scientists, as computational agents are unable to resolve most of the ambiguities that human readers tolerate. In this note we will examine some examples of naming systems used in science, and extrapolate from this analysis to consider the suitability and effective use of Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) in computationally mediated communication about science.

URI-based Naming Systems for Science.

Web of  data. Resources

URIQA: The Nokia URI Query Agent Model

The URI Query Agent Model
A Semantic Web Enabler

Overview

As the Semantic Web emerges and the behavior of automated software becomes increasingly directed by explicit knowledge about resources, gathered from disparate sources, the need for a standardized means of sharing authoritative knowledge about a given resource, based solely on the URI denoting that resource, becomes critical to achieving a fully open, global, scalable, and ubiquitous Semantic Web.

URIQA (URI Query Agent) is a model for knowledge discovery, both from authoritative sources as well as from arbitrary third party sources. It introduces an extension to the present web architecture used to indicate to a web server that it should resolve the specified URI in terms of knowledge about the resource denoted by that URI rather than in terms of a representation of the resource in question.

Concise Bounded Resource Descriptions

URIQA employs a particular form of resource description called a concise bounded description. A concise bounded description of a resource is a general and broadly optimal unit of specific knowledge about that resource to be utilized by, and/or interchanged between, semantic web agents.

Concise bounded descriptions are defined in the W3C Member Submission http://www.w3.org/Submission/CBD/.

Extending the Web Architecture

Semantic Web Methods for HTTP

URIQA extends the present web architecture by introducing the following new HTTP methods for interacting with an authoritative semantic web enabled web server:

The Nokia URIQA Semantic Web Service

The Nokia URIQA semantic web service is implemented as an RDF Gateway Package. This service constitutes the backbone of the Nokia Semantic Web Server, and also provides a reference implementation demonstrating the correct behavior of a URIQA enlightened server. The Nokia implementation may be downloaded and used free of charge, in accordance with the terms specified.

URIQA: The Nokia URI Query Agent Model.