Re: Boeing XRI Use Cases

At Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:04:18 -0700,
John Bradley <john.bradley@wingaa.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi Erik,
> 
> I think the specific's of ARK are a bit of a diversion from the main
> topic.

True; apologies if I have take the discussion too far off track.
 
> If I understood Henrys suggestion correctly he was proposing using a  
> mechanism similar to ARK for indicating to client applications that  
> they are processing an XRI rather than a http: URL.

Having gone back over the discussion, though I still do not understand
XRIs, I think I can follow a bit better. Reading metaDataInURI-31 did
clarify one thing for me:

| Assignment authorities may publish specifications detailing the
| structure and semantics of the URIs they assign. Other users of
| those URIs may use such specifications to infer information about
| resources identified by URI assigned by that authority.

In other words, it is quite legitimate that, should a client know that
ark.example.ORG and ark.example.COM are part of ARK, for that client
to interpret ARKs published by ark.example.ORG in the way specified in
the ARK spec; namely, that http://ark.example.ORG/ark:/12345/abcdef
can be considered equivalent to
http://ark.example.COM/ark:/12345/abcdef, or, at least, should
ark.example.ORG go away, ark.example.COM may be used instead.

I would like also to make the further point that ARK-unaware clients
that encounter http://ark.example.org/ark:/12345/abcdef lose nothing
by not interpreting that URI as an special ARK; they simply do not
gain the benefit that ARK provides (resolution of the identifier
following the dissolution of example.org). I do not know if this is
the case for XRI.

Furthermore, I think that ARKs do perhaps differ from XRIs in that the
number of organizations that are ever going to use ARK has a small
upper-bound; let us say, generously, 10,000. It is a small enough
number that a list of domains which, when used in URIs may be
considered to be publishing ARKs is small enough that every
ARK-enabled client could keep a copy. Again, I do not know if the same
holds for XRIs.

> […]

best,
Erik Hetzner

;; Erik Hetzner, California Digital Library
;; gnupg key id: 1024D/01DB07E3