Private Vocabulary URI Space

What Is It?

This URI space may be used by any third party to provide persistent URIs for vocabulary terms. No registration of terms or URIs is required, instead a naming scheme is provide to partition the URI space. It is intended for safe creation of private, experimental or ad-hoc vocabularies. Third parties can add documentation for the URI space by contacting the operator of vocab.org (Ian Davis <iand@internetalchemy.org>), however users of the URIs defined here should not expect representations or documentation to be available.

Status

This URI space is STABLE and there are no plans to change it in the future.

Naming Scheme

URIs in this space take the general form:

http://vocab.org/vnd/DOMAIN/DATE/OPAQUE

The DOMAIN part comprises a domain name that is or has been under the control of the naming entity.

The DATE part comprises a date on which the domain name was under control of the naming entity. The date may expressed either as a 4 digit year, a four digit year plus a two digit month, or a four digit year, a two digit month and a two digit day. Any year, month and day components must be separated by a hyphen '-'. A date consisting solely of a four digit year is interpreted as representing the first day of that year. Dates consisting of a four digit year followed by a two digit month are interpreted as representing the first day of that month in that year. All dates represent a time of midnight on the specified day.

The OPAQUE part comprises any character sequence required by the naming entity with the constraint that the combination of all parts must form a valid URI as defined by RFC2396 and its successors.

Examples

http://vocab.org/vnd/innovateer.com/2004-06-15/shapes/square

A URI created by the entity who controlled innovateer.com on the 15th June 2004

http://vocab.org/vnd/innovateer.com/2004-06/sounds/ping

A URI created by the entity who controlled innovateer.com on the 1st June 2004

http://vocab.org/vnd/innovateer.com/2004/colours/indigo

A URI created by the entity who controlled innovateer.com on the 1st January 2004

Mappings

The vocab.org domain is mapped from the PURL http://purl.org/vocab/. Any URI of the form http://vocab.org/vnd/DOMAIN/DATE/OPAQUE may additionaly be reached via the URI http://purl.org/vocab/vnd/DOMAIN/DATE/OPAQUE

It is recommended that all vocabularies using the third party URI space define their term URIs using the PURL rather than the vocab.org domain. The PURL is expected to persist longer than vocab.org, although every effort will be made to ensure that vocab.org persists for as long as possible. (Please see the availability statement for more information on this topic)