Re: Belated comments on OCLC's proposal

I haven't had time to go over the whole OCLC proposal, but I do want
to add one thing to Mitra's comment:

> 1.0 IV: Naming authority flat space scales ....
> 
> I disagree entirely with this, the number of sites at the second level of
> DNS is already stretching things, what will happen when every college
> student is going to have to register as a naming authority (unregistered
> NA's aren't persistant). Currently these are handled very well by a
> hierarchical DNS that works effectively in the .edu domains.

I am very opposed to a flat name space.  There's way too much
opportunity to control it.  Anybody should be able to be a publisher.
So we need to make sure that there's lots of ways to get a chunk of
name space.  Hierarchical assignment/delegation work pretty well for
this.

By a similar argument, I'm opposed to a flat lookup scheme.  Primary
responsibility for resolution should be given to a party that is
interested in making sure it works.  The best way to do this is to let
a publisher provide resolution of its own resources, or delegate such
resolution to a service of *its* choosing.  Also, the publisher should
be able to it change its mind at any time about where the resolution
is done.

That's not to say that there can't be other resolution services, but
these should be a back-up to those provided by the publisher.

Keith

Received on Friday, 16 June 1995 15:18:02 UTC