Re: Brainstorming: Key Issues

On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 09:26:45AM -0800, Karen Coyle wrote:
> You can comment on these and/or post your own. Don't think about it  
> too hard -- let's get as many issues on the table as we can! (I did 5  
> - you can do any number you wish.)

Some more:

1. Persistence of resolvable URIs.  In the short term, Linked
   Data facilitates mash-ups, but for the long term, the use
   of RDF and URIs holds out the possibility of preserving
   the meaning of content in a way that will remain accessible
   twenty years from now -- provided that the URIs on which
   it is based are not sold, re-purposed, or simply forgotten
   and remain resolvable to machine-readable documentation.
   For libraries, this implies not just preservation policies
   for locally owned URIs and associated content, but an
   active voice, as a community, in the long-term governance
   of the global Web's Domain Name System.

2. Provenance of triples.  In Linked Data, statements may be
   merged from many sources, creating a graph the statements
   of which may no longer be traceable to those sources.
   This problem can be solved in pragmatic, non-standard ways,
   but as institutions which historically were created
   to make citations resolvable, libraries have a stake in
   supporting the standardization of graph identification [1].
   One very practical related problem is that which MacKenzie
   Smith has called "attribution stacking" -- how to credit the
   one hundred creators of a graph created from the merger
   of one hundred sources [2].  MacKenzie Smith refers
   to Provenance as one of the "three Ps of Linked Data",
   the other two being Persistence (see #1 above) and Policy
   (Karen's point #4 [3]).

   [1] http://www.w3.org/2011/rdf-wg/wiki/TF-Graphs
   [2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSmG1-hoZfE&t=43m43s
   [3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-xg-lld/2011Feb/0044.html

3. Preservation of vocabularies.  We can be reasonably certain
   that the Library of Congress will be around twenty
   years from now, so the persistence of http://id.loc.gov
   seems secure, though history shows that ultimately no
   institution is too big to fail.  At the other extreme,
   useful vocabularies may be created by sponsored projects
   with a known expiration date.  How can memory organizations,
   including libraries, better collaborate to ensure that
   ownership and responsibility for persistence of access
   (and possibly for ongoing maintenance duties) devolves
   over time to institutions committed to their preservation?

4. When to coin new terms, when to re-use, and how to align.

Come on, everyone - let's bash out some more ideas...!

Tom

-- 
Tom Baker <tbaker@tbaker.de>

Received on Monday, 21 February 2011 16:43:21 UTC