XML.com 'Semantic Web: A Primer' article (the SW and you ;-)

[Aaron Swartz]

Dan Brickley <daniel.brickley at b...> wrote:

> This stuff also raises countless interesting legal/technical/political
> issues surrounding unique identification of inviduals... Not to
> mention privacy...

Which is true. It always bothered me that RDFweb used mailto:s to identify
people. I think this is a bad idea, for several reasons:

1) people are afraid to give out their email because of spam
2) email addresses change and become outdated
3) email addresses let you contact the person, but don't give any
information by themselves

I'd propose website URLs, with these benefits:

1) plenty of people have websites
2) they already have lots of information on them
3) if they change, people can set up a PURL
4) if you don't have one, you can still set up a PURL, pointing to
nowhere

-- 
[ Aaron Swartz | me at a... | http://www.aaronsw.com ]