The Sun BabelFish Blog
Don't panic !
Permalinks for everything!
Permalinks are the gold that we internet pioneers are all sifting for. Every permalink that we add to our body of content is an achor which other people can point to. Every time someone links to one of our little nuggets it's internet value goes up. We never change the permalink of a post. Never! That would be like throwing money out of the window. All the effort at creating a community we have worked on would dissapear, available if we are lucky and only for those really seeking us via archive.org like one may still find an old valuable piece of furniture in a bazaar. Changing a permalink would be like Sun deciding to change its main site to sunw.com, or Google to move its home page to schmoogle. Or for Disney to rename itself CSMB, or for Coca Cola to change its brand name. People only do this after some massive failure of absolutely gigantic proportions. Hell the tobacco industry heavyweights such as Marlboro have still not changed their name, though one would think they would been shamed into doing it by now. That's the value of brand. And every little permalink is an element of your brand.
And yet how many sites fail to understand this principle! When you go to a site, see if the url of the site makes sense. Would you dare send it to someone, with the feeling that they would then see the same thing you did? You send your grandson a pointer to http://mypettoy.com/123sdfljmkze/sdfsdf32pze and hope that what they will see is that teddybear, and not something completely different. If you have to pray, then the site has allready lost your voice, your ability to tell someone about a great product of theirs. And in the process they may have lost a sale.
So the same should be true of every product a company produces. Every product should have its permalink homepage, with both a human readable version, with picture and documentation, and an attached machine readable version. The BBC has shown the way by putting an index to all its past programs online. There should be enough information on each page, to make it the reference page, so that there is a strong reason for people to point to it. It should be clear that this page is never going to change, or if there is a change that this will be some improovement which will be logged in an Atom feed. The reference page phenomenon will be strengthened if all the core information concerning that product is available on that page and every other page on that site referencing that product, like a wiki, links to that page. This should be true both for the machine readable and the human readable version. Creating this web of reference links will make people feel comfortable using your URLs to talk about a product just as if it were a well understood name. This name will then grow in useage and as it grows it will become easier to find things about the product by going to that site or by querying search engines or Sparql endpoints. Just as you can find out a lot of information by searching google for pages linking to Sun, so you can find pages pointing to this entry.
But that is just the beginning of the story. Because just as you name
products, other
people can name relations. And if these get to be well established
(by following similar guidances as the ones described above for
products), then it becomes possible to search much more precisely for
different types of relations of your product
to other things. Which are the parts
of a component? What is the name
of the product? You want to buy a product? Don't just click on any link!
Click on the one that has the well known "buying link"[1] relation.
Publishing your data this way is like entering it into a neatly
organised relational database, with every page acting as a table. Every
product becomes an id key. The only difference is that your data is now
available for the whole world to use and to work with.
Once
published you can now collect this information with a crawler, store it
in an RDF database (such as Sesame,
Jena, or Kowari/Mulgara,
...) and make the database queryable via a SPARQL
interface, so that robots may quickly find the information they need or
do some fun mashups
that you may never have thought about, and that will make your data yet
more valuable: say a google maps mashup that shows where all the Sun
Rays in a company are located. Add RFID
in the mix and things start getting really interesting.
To do this of course don't invent another xml language. Just use RDF. The tools are simple, and available now. Follow the Best Practice Recipes. You can make every one of your products have a permalink, and in the process start investing in information gold. As with all investments, those that invest at the right time (and that is usually a little earlier than later) gain the most.
[1] still to be coined.
Posted at 09:18AM May 23, 2006 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in SemWeb | Comments[1]
Note on comments:
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Posted by Jerome Louvel on May 26, 2006 at 09:12 AM CEST #