The use of http-based URIs as long term identifiers is fraught with danger. The Linked-Data movement relies on this.

Lets go back to TBL’s “famous” cool URIs don’t change paper. He certainly makes good points - and basically says that a URI does not change - people change them - for a number of technical and business reasons he outlines. So far so good.

Keep reading until the section “So what should I do? Designing URIs” and two real URI (good) examples are given:
http://www.pathfinder.com/money/moneydaily/latest/
http://www.pathfinder.com/money/moneydaily/1998/981212.moneyonline.html

Guess what? These URLs are broken - uncool - I suppose:

So, what happened?

The owners of the URI - publishers of the Money magazine - decided to move its Money magazine to a new URI - http://www.money.com - a fair and reasonable business decision - given that it looks like a merger/takeover from CNN.

Ironically, the Cool URI paper says “Assumes that money will mean the same thing throughout the life of pathfinder.com” - clearly the assumption was wrong. But this happens every day - and to say that these URIs - cool as they maybe - should not change - is simply not understanding human and business behaviour.

A company as big and rich as CNN could not save those two URIs - how could the rest of us?