[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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