Re: URIs and Unique IDs

On Nov 3, 2008, at 10:48 AM, Michael Lang(Jr.) wrote:

>  I strongly believe (and it seems that you and John agree) that if a  
> UID for a concept changes, the old version must have some way of  
> pointing to the new version.

Funny, I would have said this the other way around (new points back to  
old, then the system services can provide the old -> new capability --  
or is this what you are saying too?).  I have this notion that *any*  
change to a static resource's specifications -- definition, metadata,  
semantics -- makes a new resource (this lets me compare resource_new  
to resource_old and see the difference between them unambiguously).

With this vision, the resource can't change once it is created, even  
to point to a new resource (you see the problem).  Is this vision just  
plain wrong, per the consensus?

On Nov 3, 2008, at 3:11 PM, Michael F Uschold wrote:
> In marine science at least, this is just Not Going To Happen in any  
> pervasive way for quite a while.
> For social or technical reasons? IF teh latter, are teh tecnical  
> reasons fundamental and not going to change, or can technology  
> evolve to improve things? What if the standard tools did it for you,  
> would there still be resistance.

A bit of both. The difficulty is that the community uses every tool  
and standard in the universe (!), many of them custom and one-off  
programs, most of them severely non-semantic, and many not very  
sophisticated, in this context at least.  So it isn't like we change  
"the standard tools" because there are no standard tools. And the cost  
of making the changes (assuming we agree on all the changes to make)  
is high compared to the funds available to make the changes, and the  
larger community just does not see the need (yet).  Yes we can address  
the semantic part, but we need a major consensus on broad approaches  
to have that attitude impact actual community usage. (Working on it. :- 
 >)

John

--------------
John Graybeal   <mailto:graybeal@mbari.org>  -- 831-775-1956
Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
Marine Metadata Interoperability Project: http://marinemetadata.org

Received on Tuesday, 4 November 2008 05:25:35 UTC