Would a:rose by any other URN smell as sweet?

Here I continue with the questions raised in the previous post. My answer to this question is basically summed up in this xml-dev post Reading between the lines, the answer to the subject line is “maybe”. If it’s a different URN it’s a different rose; they may not smell the same at all.

Naming things distinctly is crucial to the REST camps vision of the world. If you can’t name something you can’t identify it and retrieve it. However, this means we need a lot of URN’s. Not only do we need a lot of URN’s we need to have some way of understanding the URN’s. An identifier might be opaque (what does id=1234567687 mean?), but once you start naming things you really want to know the semantics of the names. If you don’t know the semantics you need some way of discovering them. If I’m looking for roses I need to know that Rosa and Rose may mean the same thing.

Alternatively, you don’t name everything. You serve up bigger blobs that people can do discovery inside of. When looking for roses you’ve got to know to look for florists first. Either way, discovery is part of the future of the semantic web. That seems to mean that pure REST isn’t possible in the broadest sense, but I wonder if anyone ever thought it would solve all the worlds problems?

More thoughts on discovery and
naming from xml-dev.