Context is hard, I agree. I’m not sure of an 100% solution, but I think it’s something that needs to be explored more – at the moment, I feel we shy away from it a little because it is hard, and/or design messily around it, rather than attempting a standard approach, and then iterating on that.

My instinct is to go for a canonical, public facing URL for each thing, and then append the context to the URL, but also, in the public facing experience, I’d go a little less abstract than /things – so:

/people/arnold-s
/people/arnold-s/politics
/people/arnold-s/entertainment

This appeals to me mainly because of the hackability – that you could potentially see different aspects of the same person more easily, and because the information is similar across people. It wouldn’t stop you having a /politics or /entertainment aggregation of people, though.

I can see that your suggested way will also have many advantages – and honestly, whilst I lean towards the above, I’d advocate the importance of trying small prototypes of both approaches and learning from that as a key next step, rather than making the decision up front. But that might not always be possible, of course…

Now, I don’t actually have a good solution to this problem, but what about ‘contextualised’ things? Clearly if it’s personal context (geography, device etc) then you’ll want to take responsive approaches, but what about more nuanced contexts that depend on what the user is interested in at a particular time.

I am thinking along the lines of two contexts like these:
- I am interested in Arnold Schwarzenegger, the politician
- I am interested in Arnold Schwarzenegger, the movie star

Would you consider each one a composite ‘thing’?

If yes, what is this thing? (and would this be the start of a slippery slope?)

If no, would each user want to experience something different depending on their interest?
e.g.
/things/arnold-s = generic page
/politics/arnold-s = a politics ‘view’ over this person
/entertainment/arnold-s = an entertainment ‘view’ over this person

Dave

…It’s that it’s very hard to deliver a good user experience over telegraph wires, through the post, or by using Mr Marconi’s new-fangled radio.

We learnt a lot more by the first decade of the Twenty-First century though.

Good article, silly typos aside.

I have mostly worked on smaller sites to date, which have not had quite so much content to organize, but I will bring this kind of thinking with me in future.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes
http://www.bbc.co.uk/music
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/wildlife

The UX isn’t necessarily perfect, as I discussed in the blog post, but the foundations are there. And machine readable, too!

Channel 4′s Programmes platform, which is the underpinning of 4oD, is a great example of this approach too.