Persistence

Hi Ronald,

If there had been time on this afternoon's meeting I'd have asked you 
more about persistence. We (W3C) are sponsoring a workshop next month on 
this topic [1] and I'm slated to speak about the issue of persistence 
and how it relates to eGov. Which just gives me the task of finding out 
enough facts to have something interesting to say ;-)

Sandro is also interested in making progress with the topic which is in 
the GLD charter.

In the GLD context, we're concerned about the persistence of namespaces. 
The reason that I've suggested that the EU sponsored vocabularies are 
hosted on w3.org is partly driven by the desire to avoid them being 
geographically identified by having a .eu TLD but mostly about them 
being persistent. The W3C policy on persistence is a rare thing [2]. We 
also have a policy on URIs so that when we put stuff online it has a URI 
that /can/ be long term, which usually means including a date in it 
somewhere.

In the broader context, the same thing applies to all government Web 
content. For a while under the previous government, the UK had a 
department called the Department for Children, Families and Schools 
which had a Website at http://www.dcfs.gov.uk. It was abolished by the 
incoming government last year and reverted to its old name of the 
Department for Education. What happened to the old site? 302-> 
http://www.education.gov.uk/ (not even a 301!). This sort of thing 
happens all the time of course but if there were a general policy of 
persistence for gov Web sites there would be no need for the National 
Archives to get involved [3] and, of course, URIs wouldn't change.

Are these the sorts of things you plan to cover or am I off topic?

Sandro has a proposal around things like namespace documents having a 
'living will' - i.e. if the maintaining organisation ceases to exist or 
can no longer maintain a Web presence then some other organisation takes 
over.

Home pages change all the time of course and rightly so - but things 
like reports and ministerial statements could, surely, be archived long 
term and not be subject to being thrown out every time a government 
changes or a new CMS is installed?

I'm grateful for any insights and experiences people are able to share. 
Full credit will be given of course.

Thanks

Phil.


[1] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/idcc_workshop.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Persistence.html
[3] http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/*/http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/



-- 


Phil Archer
W3C eGovernment
http://www.w3.org/egov/

http://philarcher.org
+44 (0)7887 767755
@philarcher1

Received on Thursday, 17 November 2011 16:55:30 UTC