Do RDF URIs have a trailing slash or not?

[Erik Hetzner]

Sometimes a slash trails a URI, sometimes it doesn't. Here is an example:

In the RDF at:

  http://openlibrary.org/works/OL1099280W.rdf

the URI used is:

  http://openlibrary.org/works/OL1099280W/

It links to manifestations, which have URIs like:

  http://openlibrary.org/books/OL22960396M/

But when I retrieve:

  http://openlibrary.org/books/OL22960396M.rdf

the URI used there is:

  http://openlibrary.org/books/OL22960396M

This makes it difficult to do automated parsing based on the URIs.

Thank you for working of this project.

[Ben (bencompanjen)]

If I may vote, I'd vote to not use trailing slashes. IMHO a trailing slash looks strange, because if the URI as an identifier of a Work or Edition is the same as the URI for the HTML representation of its description, how can one assert things about either things?
How about: URI of a Work, Edition or Author has no trailing slash, URIs of their (default) HTML descriptions do have a trailing slash and descriptions in other formats have a file type extension at the end like they do now (.rdf, .json)?

[Ben (bencompanjen)]

Hopefully I'm allowed to say this issue is in progress; there is some discussion on the tech list about this.