Well said Jonathan.
Some persons must "voluntarily take on the burden to just "try very hard" to make domains used in URIs be well-behaved in perpetuity."
"Trying very hard" to make URI domains well-behaved is the work at hand and needs a lot more clarity and definition than we yet have. Whether those URI domains be LSID or some other, well-behaved will not happen by any other means than hard work by some persons dedicated to it. Who are those persons? Who pays them? It seems to me that GBIF is the logical place for the persons to do this "very hard trying."
Chuck
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Jonathan Rees Sent: Tuesday, September 01, 2009 9:03 AM To: Bob Morris Cc: Technical Architecture Groupmailing list Subject: Re: [tdwg-tag] LSID Sourceforge URL & LSID Best Practices
On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 12:29 AM, Bob Morrismorris.bob@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 11:52 AM, Jonathan Reesjar@creativecommons.org wrote:
... The fact that ICANN and DNS work as well as they do prevents anyone from working on an administratively decentralized alternative.
Umm, I would say that DNS is a giant success story about administratively decentralized technology, but my parsing of this sentence makes me believe that you think it is not administratively decentralized but should be. I suppose only the TLD servers have their DNS records administered of necessity by a single agency, and those provide substantial redundancy.
Sorry I was not clear. Yes, DNS/ICANN is a success story for decentralization. I was not referring to the system as a whole but rather to individual domain names. If the owner of a domain disappears or reorganizes, then all users of its URIs are screwed - the well-known 404 problem. This phenomenon is what I've been calling an "administrative single point of failure" resulting from "administrative centralization", in contrast to "technical single point of failure". No amount of technical replication can address this vulnerability. Just saying that a URI is "persistent" does not make it so, and we know that domains go south in spite of the best intentions of those who originally create and disseminate its URIs, and in spite of the availability of technical replicas (at other locations) of the data that users need.
The only alternative to DNS/ICANN is some alternative to it (sorry) - say, if domain D goes away but a copy of the needed information exists at E, then configure clients somehow to resolve D to E instead of to what ICANN tells you. This is what I've been calling "administrative" redundancy, which has a distinctly different character from mere technical redundancy. My point was just that even though such consumer choice would be wonderful, in principle, and resembles the way that historically robust systems such as the Linnaean system and libraries work (and that would be required in order for many kinds of URN to work), it is a fantasy - it's very unlikely to come about, because DNS/ICANN works so well. (Same argument applies to handle system.) Consumers are left with no power, and putatively-persistent-URI creators, in selfless service to consumers, have to voluntarily take on the burden to just "try very hard" to make domains used in URIs be well-behaved in perpetuity.
Jonathan _______________________________________________ tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag