Re: [semanticweb] Purl.org offline?

----- "Reto Bachmann-GmŸr" <reto.bachmann@trialox.org> wrote:

> From: "Reto Bachmann-GmŸr" <reto.bachmann@trialox.org>
> To: "Giovanni Tummarello" <giovanni.tummarello@deri.org>
> Cc: "carmen r" <_@whats-your.name>, "semantic-web at W3C" <semantic-web@w3.org>
> Sent: Thursday, 16 October, 2008 6:33:07 AM GMT +10:00 Brisbane
> Subject: Re: [semanticweb] Purl.org offline?
>
> Giovanni Tummarello said the following on 2008-10-15 20:49:
> > Hey stop it there friend :-) this is basically like saying
> resolvable
> > URIs are bad, unthinkable
> >   
> The weakness does not lie in the resolvability of the URIs but in the
> centralized aspects of the DNS system. Fulfilling the design principle
> of decentralization takes some effort but usually brings significant
> benefits in terms of long-term scalability and stability. I don't think
> the W3C is a club of hippie scientist by adhering to that principle.
> 
> The importance of the question how long knowledge expressed in triples
> will still be understandable depends on the application, but I don't
> think that it is irrelevant nor that the answer is imperatively based on
> quantum entanglement.

I think the answer to at least some of these questions might be in an RDF equivalent of the WayBackMachine [1], but with more than one provider instead of just archive.org who can cache entire RDF documents, detect when the documents change and provide different versions for the future.

The DNS system isn't broken, and for most levels of the DNS system there is massive redundancy. The lack of redundancy mostly appears at the last one or two levels in the heirarchy, where redundancy is still available, but not commonly implemented.

Also, there are methods to ensure that casinos don't take over sites which have community support and brand recognition, so the casino example isn't exactly true, although letting registration lapse because the community hasn't supported something enough to give donations to keep the domain name stable. Everyone wants a great service for free, but inevitably something will be a limiting factor.

If you really want to trust some triples meet the author in person and exchange flash drives full of RDF and transcribe their GPG key onto a piece of paper. Then you have a full permanent copy of their triples (as at a particular date) and you can just internally repoint their particular domain name to your local cache for future use as long as you survive. (Of course this DNS redirection method doesn't work in the general case for purl.org but it will for domain-specific hosts)

Cheers,

Peter

[1] http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

Received on Wednesday, 15 October 2008 20:59:20 UTC