RE: Boeing XRI Use Cases

I'm not happy with the ARK approach, because my company may have reason
to mint a URI like http://boeing.com/ark:/120025/654xz321 that has
nothing to do with ARK, and has no relationship to the object identified
by http://loc.gov/ark:/12025/654xz321 or
http://rutgers.edu/ark:/12025/654xz321.


Marty.Schleiff@boeing.com; CISSP
Associate Technical Fellow - Cyber Identity Specialist
Information Security - Technical Controls
(206) 679-5933

-----Original Message-----
From: Henry S. Thompson [mailto:ht@inf.ed.ac.uk] 
Sent: Tuesday, July 15, 2008 12:27 PM
To: Mark Baker
Cc: Booth, David (HP Software - Boston); www-tag@w3.org
Subject: Re: Boeing XRI Use Cases


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Mark Baker writes:

> If you're trying to extend the Web in a way that requires providing 
> license to agents to extract information from URIs - which appears to 
> be a key part of the functionality XRIs are trying to provide (see
> 1.1.1 of xri-syntax) - then you need a new URI scheme.

I want to be sure I'm not mistaken to focus on the word 'agent' in the
above.  I take it we agree that it's perfectly alright for a _server_ to
extract information from http: URIs, in particular to treat the path (or
'hierarchical part') as other than a literal path through a hierarchical
storage medium.

I guess where this gets tricky is when the _minters_ of URIs start
relying on authority delegation in the path.

Consider the ARK proposal (which I have always held up as a model of how
to use http: URIs to address requirements similar to many of the
requirements on XRI) [1].

It offers an approach in which e.g.

      http://loc.gov/ark:/12025/654xz321
      http://rutgers.edu/ark:/12025/654xz321

identify the _same_ object.  Implicit in the overall proposal is the
proposition that the above example URIs were minted by people other than
the owners of the domain names they begin with.  The minters _are_
expected to be the owners of the subsidiary authority identified by
12025 in the above URIs, and it only makes sense for them to do so if
they have an agreement in place with the owners of rutgers.edu and
loc.gov to serve and/or proxy to representations as specified by the ARK
RFC, which gives them a kind of second-hand ability to mint URIs.

Are you happy with that kind of design?

ht

[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-kunze-ark-15
- -- 
       Henry S. Thompson, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
                         Half-time member of W3C Team
      10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131
650-4440
                Fax: (44) 131 650-4587, e-mail: ht@inf.ed.ac.uk
                       URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/ [mail really
from me _always_ has this .sig -- mail without it is forged spam]
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Received on Tuesday, 15 July 2008 19:38:24 UTC