Pleiades URL Scheme

Short, unique, stable URLs encourage reuse, collaboration, and creative mashups.

In a Nutshell

Places will be assigned a unique integer id.

The id of a Name will be based on its transliteration in roman characters, all lower case, with white space converted to a "-". For example, "Olympus Mons" becoomes "olympus-mons". "Apollonia ad Rhyndacum" becomes "apollonia-ad-rhyndacum".

The URL to a name resource will be like:

/place/PLACE_ID/NAME_ID

For example, /place/42/ninoe and /place/42/aphrodisias are two names, in different times, for one place.

The Details

It's clear that we can't have thousands of places in a single Plone folder. We're going to use some URL aliasing to implement our scheme. Places will be added to Plone folders of no more than N (~1000?) members, and so Plone users, within the site, will see URLs like /place/0/42/ninoe or /place/20/20001/wherepolis.

Update: Huge folders may not be as bad as I thought. The batch folders can probably be avoided, and we'll no longer have parallel internal and external URLs.

Example

http://icon.stoa.org/pleiades-beta/place/22/

http://icon.stoa.org/pleiades-beta/place/22/apamea

http://icon.stoa.org/pleiades-beta/place/22/kelainai

http://icon.stoa.org/pleiades-beta/place/22/kibotos

Requests for these URLs are passed through to objects in the Plone site. Plone users will see somewhat different, but sensible in-site locations. It is important that we highlight the URLs intended for dissemination onto the web.