- From: Graham Klyne <GK-lists@ninebynine.org>
- Date: Wed, 13 Oct 2010 23:11:02 +0100
- To: Jonathan Rees <jar@creativecommons.org>
- CC: www-tag@w3.org
Jonathan Rees wrote: > http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/persistent-reference/ > > > ISSUE-50 > ACTION-444 Very interesting analysis... A thought that occurred to me while reading through this was that there is a related notion, which I'll call "fragility", that might usefully be considered. From your note: "In choosing one form of reference over another - traditional vs. electronic, urn: vs. http:, and so on - one is placing a bet that the form you chose will be adequately persistent, or at least more persistent than the one you didn't choose." "Conservative practitioners will probably not want to rely on a URI or any other short "identifier" string alone for reference - they would continue to provide references as a combination of conventional metadata (slow to act on) and machine-actionable forms such as http: URIs. It might be nice if this practice of hybrid references were codified a little bit..." These comments also allude to what I mean by "fragility" - that a mechanism that is subject to a single point of failure (especially when technology-dependent) is more likely to fail than one that offers multiple routes to resolution. Maybe it's bit like security: for dependability look to multiple overlapping layers, such that failure of one (or a few) doesn't leave the system completely broken. (In my observation, a problem with http: URIs can be that in many organizations the HTTP URI space is controlled by a (powerful) marketing department with little regard for persistence. This may lead to a certain expectation that HTTP URIs are transient, despite exhortations that they should be otherwise and the existence of exemplars that stability is possible.) #g
Received on Thursday, 14 October 2010 07:09:24 UTC