Multilingual Linked Open Data Patterns

Internationalized Local Names

Description

Internationalized local names are IRIs where the domain part is restricted to ASCII characters while the local name can use Unicode characters.

Context

This pattern can offer a trade-off between security and readability. On one hand, it limits ASCII characters for the domain part, which may be subject to homograph attacks.

On the other hand, the use of local names with Unicode characters improves readability.

Example

Armenia can be identified with this hybrid approach by:

http://example.org#Հայաստան

Discussion

This pattern avoids the problems associated with domain name spoofing while it offers more human-friendly resource identifiers.

While this partially solves the problem, the possibility of spoofing using visual equivalent IRIs for different purposes remains.

However, as the domain name is preserved as the authoritative source, it is much more difficult to accomplish such attacks.

See also

This pattern is opposed to the Opaque URIs pattern. It extends the Descriptive URIs pattern but is more restrictive than the Full IRIs pattern. This patterns is employed in DBpedia International.