Re: Persistence

Phil,

I agree with Sandro. There needs to be a way to easily change ownership 
and stewardship to another party.

My thinking on this mirrors what has worked in the non-digital world. 
Archives are run by third-party stewards.  It is neither the creator nor 
the receiver of a letter who keeps the piece of paper. It is an archive 
that keeps the letter.  Archives are usually organized by topic or 
geo-political locations. When items are deposited, the donor and the 
archive come to a written agreement about the long-term use of the 
material.

The challenge of maintaining stability for electronic material is that 
creators and stewards are often one entity. When the owner no longer is 
interested in being a good steward, unfortunately things disappear. Ron 
and I have had a few conversations about this trying to work out the 
approach for the Stability Best Practices.

Unfortunately there is a cost to being a good steward for electronic 
material.



Anne L. Washington, PhD
Standards work - W3C - washingtona@acm.org
Academic work - George Mason University
http://policy.gmu.edu/washington/

On Thu, 17 Nov 2011, Sandro Hawke wrote:

> On Thu, 2011-11-17 at 16:54 +0000, Phil Archer wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
> I was advocating such a proposal to Phil, but I don't claim any
> ownership of it.  I've heard Dan Brickley and Tim Berners-Lee talk about
> these issues from various angles over the years.
>
> I'm not sure it's practical, but I really don't think anyone should be
> publishing data in a vocabulary that they don't have reasonable
> confidence will be around for as long as the data will be useful, ie
> quite possibly forever.     In order to enable publication, we should, I
> think, vigorously promote vocabulary stability.
>
> My strawman proposal would be:
>
> - vocabularies should be given their own domain name, probably in .net
> (they are infrastructure).   this way full ownership as well as
> maintenance duties can be transfered, legally, as necessary.
>
> - there should be a two-level ownership structure, where one
> disinterested, trusted, 3rd party (like the executor of a will) retains
> final control, but delegates to the creator/maintainer.   With written
> policies about what happens in various eventualities.   But, basically,
> if either of these parties loses interest, they can be smoothly
> replaced, and if the creator/maintainer ceases operation or stops acting
> in good faith, it can be replaced.
>
>      -- Sandro
>
>
>
>

Received on Thursday, 17 November 2011 21:29:58 UTC