RE: Boeing XRI Use Cases

Henry asks: 

> What is the problem if you do?

Even if Boeing isn't party to the ARK story, perhaps some of our
business partners are. Perhaps Boeing and some of its partners are also
party to the (fictional) Aerospace Research Knowledgebase consortium --
we can be party to more than one party interested in the letters ARK.
When we convey a URI like http://boeing.com/ark:/120025/654xz321 to one
of our business partners, how are they supposed to tell if it's an ARK
identifier or something else? Perhaps it was intended solely as a
globally unique identifier, with no intent to  support dereferencing.
When the business partner is cautious and makes a metadata request, but
gets no helpful response (by design or by network outage), how do they
divine the intent of the URI?

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 1:38 PM
To: Schleiff, Marty
Cc: Mark Baker; Booth, David (HP Software - Boston); www-tag@w3.org
Subject: Re: Boeing XRI Use Cases

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Schleiff, Marty writes:

> 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.

What is the problem if you do?  If Boeing isn't a party to the ARK
story, then it is under no obligation to behave according to that story
when it handles GET requests.

And of course, in a way parallel to the WEBDAV story told elsewhere in
this thread, a cautious user of ARK-based URIs will make a metadata
request (via an empty query string) to confirm that they have an ARK URI
before proceeding based on that assumption

ht
- -- 
       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 21:16:10 UTC