RE: URI persistence Was: Use Case: BetaNYC 3/5

Christophe,

 

What do you mean with “a shortage of unique identifiers”? I understand that the identifier space for telephone numbers is limited but in case of http-based URIs, I don’t see the need to re-assign the same identifier more than once. In my mind, we should indeed state as best practice no to re-assign identifiers. And then, yes, we can’t enforce good practice – but at least we could explain that re-assigning identifiers makes a big mess of things.

 

On the guarantee issue, my experience in talking to data providers is that no-one seems to be willing to make such strong statements. In general, the statement would be “as long as we have money to sustain it” or (in commercial cases) “as long as we can make money off of it”. I think that the best we, as a group, can do is to recommend that data publishers at least consider the question and think beyond the immediate future. Depending on what stuff it  is, they may need to think about the legal requirements and the expectations of the users of the data, and ideally they should design some form of policy for the time that they themselves can no longer maintain the material – which may or may not involve handing it over to someone else (e.g. some public or private archive).

 

Makx.