Re: Next ZIG - new record type

Matthew Dovey wrote:

> - all URI's "address" either by location (URL's
> such as ftp, http) others by name (e.g. URN). All URI's should resolve to
> retrieving a document.

Sorry to dissagree.  A URI (should) do one of three things: address, name, or
identify. "address" and "name" aren't the same -- that's not relevant to this
discussion -- but "identify" is different from both, and in that role, a URI is
analogous to an oid.  A namespace identifier is not intended  to retrieve the
namespace, it is intended to identify a namespace definition. (If you receive a
namespace identifier and you don't have the definition, then you need to resolve
it - but in a very crude sense that's analogous to the way oids work.)

And of course we're talking about what UIRs *should* do, not what (http) uris do
now.  Hopefully sometime in the next few years they'll get this sorted out and
URIs will really do these things. But in the meantime, I don't have much
enthusiasm for junking oids in favor of http URIs.



--
Ray Denenberg
Library of Congress
rden@loc.gov
202-707-5795

Received on Thursday, 8 March 2001 18:06:13 UTC