Wikipedia URIs


Looks like the idea to use Wikipedia as a source of topic URIs has also occurred to fellow XMLer, David Megginson, who's just started a blog (welcome to the blogosphere, David!)

Technorati has already stepped forward with a mechanism for tagging using their URI space. One difference between that and what David and I are proposing, though, is that Technorati is just providing the URI space—the actual semantics of a tag are at the mercy of the interpretation of each tagger, with all the ambiguity that I've talked about before.

Wikipedia URIs have the advantage that disambiguation emerges quite quickly in the URI space. "python" is ambiguous as a tag, but the Wikipedia "Python" only refers to the snake and "Python programming language" is used for the programming language, "Monty Python" for the comedy group and "Rafael_Python_5" for the missile.