[Tdwg-tag] Position of GBIF in architecture and centralization of services. Correction

Bob Morris ram at cs.umb.edu
Tue Mar 7 20:12:45 CET 2006


Sounds better to me.

Roger Hyam wrote:

>
> Hi Bob,
>
> I changed to words as per your suggestion but then realized that the 
> thing might not be 'limited to' a central index or data warehouse but 
> it could still be 'dependent on' a central service so I added 'or 
> reliant on'
>
> Roger
>
> *Centralization of services*
> The TDWG architecture should not rely on any third party providing a 
> particular piece of infrastructure indefinitely. This effectively 
> rules out rules out the architecture being limited to or reliant on 
> any centralized data warehouse or indexing service beyond the hosting 
> of standards files by TDWG itself - possibly as part of its 
> collaborative infrastructure.
>
>
> Bob Morris wrote:
>
>> I meant, as written in the full sentence, "rules out the architecture 
>> being limited to". Per commentary at end, I definitely DO NOT want to 
>> rule out central architectures or indexing.
>>
>>
>>
>> Bob Morris wrote:
>>
>>> Instead of your "rules out the architecture being based on" wording, 
>>> I would prefer to see "rules out the architecture limited to":
>>>
>>> This effectively rules out the architecture being limited to 
>>> centralized data warehouse or indexing service beyond the hosting of 
>>> standards files by TDWG itself - possibly as part of its 
>>> collaborative infrastructure.
>>>
>>> What I really believe is that warehousing and indexing should 
>>> certainly be supported use cases, but so should be the kinds of 
>>> direct queries otherwise discussed. In fact, I suspect that what one 
>>> will find is that the warehousing and indexing requirements will 
>>> come down to exactly those for direct queries PLUS appropriate 
>>> support for caching support (e.g. data validity contracts), 
>>> provenance and maybe access control. The idea of separating those 
>>> three in
>>> discussion is appealing to me because I suspect they are orthogonal 
>>> to each other and to the other data storage and exchange issues. 
>>> GBIF's experience will be valuable about "what got left out" in 
>>> expanding the original distributed dreams (DiGIR, BioCase) into 
>>> contemporary centralized realities. Central vs. distributed 
>>> information processing and data provision is a perennial debate and 
>>> in the end always seems to come down to current network and server 
>>> hardware technologies. In various contexts, I have seen this 
>>> question flip-flop many times since my first serious programming in 
>>> 1965 on an IBM 1620. (Very cool CPU architecture: BCD arithmetic by 
>>> table lookup. You loaded the arithmetic tables into low memory. The 
>>> result was that you could make the machine do hardware arithmetic in 
>>> any base up to 10. Excellent for number theory...). It will flip 
>>> again, many times in the future.
>>>
>>> Bob
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Roger Hyam wrote:
>>>
>>>  
>>>
>>>> *Centralization of services*
>>>> The TDWG architecture should not rely on any third party providing 
>>>> a particular piece of infrastructure indefinitely. This effectively 
>>>> rules out the architecture being based on any centralized data 
>>>> warehouse or indexing service beyond the hosting of standards files 
>>>> by TDWG itself - possibly as part of its collaborative infrastructure.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Roger
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I
>>>>
>>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
>>>>
>>>>
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>>>> Tdwg-tag at lists.tdwg.org
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>>>>
>>>>
>>>>   
>>>
>>>
>>>  
>>>
>>
>
>

-- 
Robert A. Morris
Professor of Computer Science
UMASS-Boston
ram at cs.umb.edu
http://www.cs.umb.edu/efg
http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram
phone (+1)617 287 6466





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