Re: New version of Memento I-D

On Sat, Dec 24, 2011 at 8:48 AM, Herbert Van de Sompel
<hvdsomp@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> A new version of the Memento (Time Travel for the Web) Internet Draft is available:
>
> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-vandesompel-memento/
>
> The most important changes in this version pertain to handling archived HTTP responses with 3XX, 4XX, 5XX status codes. As always, feedback to the I-D is very welcome.
>
> Also, I would like to suggest that Memento fits in the scope of Goal (3) of the Persistence of Identifiers work:
>
> http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/products/persistence.html

This is an interesting idea - I do see Memento fitting into the
broader aim of "persistent reference" because URI together with date
establish a sort of reference (to versions of documents that don't
change more frequently than the archives snapshot them). But it seems
to me to have the goal of remediation or workaround, in the situation
where persistent identifiers are *not* available. That is, it aims to
use archives in order to make it *unnecessary* to solve the persistent
identifier problem. Therefore it does not really fall in the scope of
a persistent *identifiers* project, only  of a persistent *references*
project. I certainly consider it to be in the solution space for the
latter, although it is disturbing that there is no syntax for the kind
of reference one might want to do (the date is supplied implicitly).

The exception would be the special case of unchanging and unreplaced
documents, whose URIs under Memento become persistent URIs, even if
they were not originally designed to be such. (This would rely on
"tombstoning" i.e. persistent delivery of 404s for lost documents.) I
imagine Memento's discovery protocol would lead you to archived copies
even if the document goes missing from its original location and even
if there is no known appropriate date (right?).

Jonathan

> Greetings
>
> Herbert Van de Sompel
> http://public.lanl.gov/herbertv/

Received on Monday, 9 January 2012 00:38:27 UTC