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

Roger Hyam roger at tdwg.org
Tue Mar 7 11:14:15 CET 2006


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
>>>
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Tdwg-tag mailing list
>>> Tdwg-tag at lists.tdwg.org
>>> http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag_lists.tdwg.org
>>>
>>>
>>>   
>>
>>  
>>
>


-- 

-------------------------------------
 Roger Hyam
 Technical Architect
 Taxonomic Databases Working Group
-------------------------------------
 http://www.tdwg.org
 roger at tdwg.org
 +44 1578 722782
-------------------------------------

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