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Monday, July 16, 2012

Give every fact a home page

Jon Udell says "lets give every fact its own home page on the web.

Absolutely. Numeric quantities, in particular, need this. The web needs to get a lot better at slinging numbers - not pages - and update events around the place.

Its starting to happen. Mostly, I think because of the emerging "web of things". Things like cosm and things like Personal Event Networks need "facts" to work with and a goodly number of said facts are numeric quantities.

Now it can coherently be argued that RDF makes numerical facts just drop out of its grander epistemological theory but I worry that RDF is seen as overkill for situations where it really is just a number you are looking for.

If the URI is http://facts.com/populations/ireland. All I want to do is to a HTTP GET and get back 4487000.

The simple case should be simple.

1 comment:

Jon Udell said...

"get back 4487000" A feature of OData I love: append /$value to any URL that yields a single datum and you get the raw datum, sans XML or JSON sugar.