Re: Comments on Section 3

On Mon, Apr 14, 2003 at 02:00:08PM -0400, Nick Matsakis wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 14 Apr 2003, Kevin Smathers wrote:
> 
> > I think you are actually describing a search problem, not a naming
> > problem.
> 
> I specifically wanted to focus on the distributed naming problem, not the
> naming authority search problem;  If it requires a search, then it isn't a
> distributed naming scheme.
> 
> On this list, David suggested one way that two parties can independently
> come up with names for a given resource even though they don't have a
> network connection or search capability, and that is the MD5 hash of a
> collection of bits.  This only applies to static resources that are, in
> some sense, entirely bits.  Still, there are a lot of interesting
> resources that could be viewed this way, including audio CDs, DVDs,
> PDF-published works and less formally email messages and digital
> photographs. Dynamic content and non-digital resources, like the The
> Effiel Tower, cannot be named in this way.

The main problem that I have with this approach is that I don't consider
two files to be the same just because they happen to have the same 
content.  Likewise two facts.

A fact, like a file instance, should be able to obtain any content without
being accidentally combined with another instance.  Imagine how you
would implement default constructors, or access controls.

> > The names can be relatively arbitrary if you have a way to search for
> > the owner of record ...
> 
> While I was throwing out distributed naming as food for though, I think
> that in the SIMILE scenarios, naming authority discovery/search is more
> important than distributed naming.  It seems to me that naming discovery
> is just a special case of schema discovery --- "I have a bunch of things
> and I want to find a unique but *shared* name for them". The scenario I
> envision here would be that of a photographer who wanted to catalog photos
> of downtown Boston and needs to find a robust name for "Boston".  Perhaps
> this scheme would be suggested/enforced by the schema choosen, or perhaps
> not.
> 

This is the problem of vocabularies, listed elsewhere in the use
case document.  
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Received on Monday, 14 April 2003 17:58:51 UTC