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Cyberfinity Meatspace

Real-world resource URIs for the Cyberfinity websites.

Purpose

The Semantic Web is an effort to help programmes better understand and process information published on the Web. This is achieved by augmenting the Web with structured, machine-friendly meta-data. For instance, search engines like Google are beginning to use such data to enhance their search results with related pictures, ratings, event times etc.

The Cyberfinity websites aim to be good citizens of the Semantic Web by providing such machine-friendly meta-data. To do this they use the RDF (Resource Description Framework) standard. In RDF, every thing you want to describe needs to be uniquely identified by a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier). For digital content on the Web such as pages or images, their URLs also serve as their URIs (URLs are actually a subset of URIs). However, when describing real-world objects like people or places there are no URLs one can use - there is after all no way to locate and download a person from the internet!

While there is no requirement for a URI to point to any content, it is helpful if they do. The question then becomes what should URIs representing real-world things point to? The W3C's "Cool URIs for the Semantic Web" document recommends some useful approaches for such URIs. The "303 redirect approach" described there is the most appropriate for Cyberfinity and has therefore been adopted.

This is where Cyberfinity Meatspace comes in. All URIs representing real-world things relating to Cyberfinity are in the form http://meatspace.cyberfinty.net/uri/<thing>. After all, "meatspace" is just a name for the physical world - i.e. not cyberspace. This site then provides the necessary code to make those URIs redirect to some document about that resource.

Usage

If you publish RDF data on your own website(s) and want describe or refer to any of Cyberfinity's real-world resources, then you are very welcome to do so! One of the aims of this website is actually to expose our URIs for others to see and use. We aim to keep our site online and our URIs unchanged indefinitely (we may however alter what they redirect to when resolved). After all, "Cool URIs don't change"!

We do not have any plans to allow 3rd parties to register their own URIs in our namespace. Therefore please do not invent http://meatspace.cyberfinty.net/uri/... URIs for your own purposes. They could clash with new ones we add in future. If you are looking for a place to create your own URIs you could try purl.org or similar services.