Blog

Five Years

Tony Hammond – 2008 July 28

In Identifiers

Oh wow! A rather remarkable plea here from Dan Brickley on the public-lod mailing list which calls for the registrant of the dbpedia.org DNS entry to top it up with another 5+ years worth of clocktime. Some quotes:

_“The idea of such a cool RDF namespace having only 6 months left on the DNS registration gives me the worries.”

“If you could add another 5-10 years to the DNS registration I’d sleep easier at night.”

“Let me stress I’m not suggesting that this domain is actually at risk. Just that the not-at-risk-ness isn’t readily evident from a quick look in the DNS.”

“Those in the know are probably confident this is all in hand, but as the SW gets bigger I suspect we ought to establish practices such as “vocabularies that seek global adoption should always have 5+ years on their DNS registries”.”_

Yes, and maybe those cool URIs should have kite marks, too. 😉

(Btw, for those who may not already know the maximum length of time that any DNS name may be leased out in a single registration is 10 years, see the FAQ put out by ICANN.)

So, pity the poor user of a given semantic web application who may not know what the expectancy is behind the nodes in an RDF graph of assertions. Shifting sands, indeed.