DISQUS

Looking up www.uniprot.org simply returns multiple A records (i.e. one for each mirror) in a round-robin manner. So if one of the sites is unreachable, browsers (or other HTTP clients) should automatically try another mirror. Also, all sites are behind reverse proxies, so if a site is down e.g. because it is being updated, requests are proxied to another mirror. But there's no geo-affinity. That was tried for a while and it sort of worked, but at the cost of the failover. In either case having three mirrors (two of them in Europe) rather than two is useless and even a bit counterproductive, from a technical point of view.

Don't know about doing away with URIs... But some kind of context seems essential when looking at data from different sources. Two resources with different URIs may be the same thing, and two resources with the same URI may be different. Moreover, the meaning of "same" itself is context dependent!

Don't think the two opinions conflict: "all RDF documents containing a URI should use it to identify the same concept" != "the same concept should be identified by the same URI in different RDF documents"...