Re: Fielding on MOVE & COPY -Reply

May I throw my two cents in here. Judy is right, but for reasons that I've
yet to see voiced on this thread. File systems are only *one* document
repository that will be served by distributed authoring. There are millions
and millions of documents in Document Management Systems (DMS)
throughout the world that are crying for global, secure access. DMS
installations of GroupWise 5, SoftSolutions, PC-Docs, Visual Recall, etc.
are widely deployed and used daily for mission critical applications. The
document in a DMS is tightly controlled by version number and has many
of the meta data attributes mentioned by Judy in the quoted reply below.

Much of what I've see to date has reflected only the world of file
systems, we need to broaden our view or face leaving out a very large
repository of documents (be they on magnetic or optical media).

-src
Steve Carter
Novell
srcarter@novell.com

>>> Judith Slein <slein@wrc.xerox.com> 09/06/96 02:04pm >>>

At 09:02 AM 9/6/96 PDT, hallam@ai.mit.edu wrote:
>
>>One reason for having a separate MOVE operation is that if the
document has
>>attributes, you want a COPY operation to result in new values for
certain
>>attributes (like create date, creator) whereas a MOVE operation should
leave
>>the values alone.
>
>I disagree. Such attributes make little sense in the context of the
>Web, indeed the Web currently has no knowledge whatsoever of such
>things.
>
>If I move a file from one area of URL space to another that does
>not imply a transfer on the backing store.
>
>	Phill
>

I don't mean just file attributes, but metadata in general -- author, title,
publisher, subject, etc.  Most metadata stays the same whether a
document is
MOVEd or COPYd, but there are exceptions.  URN, if implemented, is
another
attribute that should never change when a document is MOVEd, whereas
a COPY
of a document should get its own URN.  Although work on metadata on
the Web
is very much "in progress" (URC, Z39.50, STARTS, etc.), I think it is an
important part of document management that should be encompassed by
the Web.
It should be possible to set metadata using HTTP, however it turns out to
be
expressed.  And the metadata should get updated properly when a
document
gets COPYd or MOVEd.

--Judy 
Name:		Judith A. Slein
E-Mail:		slein@wrc.xerox.com
Phone:  	8*222-5169
Fax:		(716) 265-7133
MailStop:	128-29E

Received on Friday, 6 September 1996 17:52:59 UTC