01st May 2003
ThereThen update needed
I don’t have time to update my ThereThen address writeup right now, but I do want to make a couple of notes for folks that may have an interest. The gist is: multiple TT addresses are possible for a given doc, could act as a portable method to schlep location/time info around, could fit in with an RDF-based app, uses standard notations, and can be used in web services.
A quick review: a ThereThen address provides a secondary URL to get to a web page or other web resource. An example address: [updated May 10, 2003, to reflect "altitude always in meters"]
http://therethen.example.com/
37.749991,-122.45,15/2003-02-4T13:15:20Z/SF-MOMA.html
Which shows a different method to get to:
http://example.com/Travel/2003/SF/SF-MOMA.html
So, a ThereThen address shows latitude, longitude, altitude, and time. It is not a scheme that’s meant to be typed in an address bar. It’s more oriented towards automatic generation, indexing, and lookup.
- There can be multiple TT addresses that point to the same document. They can be used to express updates from different times/locations. They can even express something like the location a trackback came from.
- A TT URL is a portable format, and could be used as a go-between so that other formats (URL and/or RDF based) can convert to and from it (2*N conversion filters), as opposed to a myriad of format A -> format B, format A -> format C, etc. conversions (N^2 conversion filters)
- A TT address could be used in an RSS 1.0/RDF context - I’m just not up to speed sufficiently to write about that yet.
- I don’t see anything about the scheme that would preclude it from use in web services apps. example: I could envision an app where you give a Zip code, or in the UK, a Post Code, and get back a TT address with lat/lon coordinates.
- A valid TT address would have a certain, standard amount of precision for latitude and longitude, and would use the prevailing standard for expressing altitude (is there one? feet or meters?). It uses the ISO 8601 standard to express time. Default placeholders need to be defined for the case(s) where a location or time is not specified. [update, May 10 2003: altitude shall always be in meters]
