random notes on LSIDs

[dave thau]

Hi Bob,

Those are my >>s so I'll respond.  Below I'm talking about the stuff in
section 13.3 of the spec.  Primarily page 27.

Dave

> Rich
>
> No reading I can make of http://www.omg.org/cgi-bin/doc?dtc/2004-05-01
> is consistent with the explanation offered below. "Authority" is not
> used at all in Section 9, "LSID Resolution Service". Instead, resolution
> is defined to be accomplished by a set of interfaces all of which take
> only a full (semantically opaque!!!! Sec. 8, p. 7!!!) LSID as argument.
> The interfaces correspond to methods offered by an LSID Resolution
> Service. Nowhere in Section 9 is there any relationship mentioned
> between resolution and the "authority identification" that is part of
> the syntax of an LSID. That is discussed in Section 8, "LSID Syntax"
> which carries the sentences (bottom of p. 7) that I have previously
> cited: "The authority identification is usually an Internet domain name.
> In this case it is recommended that it be owned by the organization that
> assigns an LSID in question".
>
> There are too many ">"s for me to understand who is claiming the stuff
> below, but whoever it is could do me a favor by telling me which part of
> the spec they are reading. (Or if they found a later document at OMG).
> Well, OK, I haven't yet read the "Accompanied Files" listed in Appendix
> A., some of which are normative and take precedence over the main
> document. Maybe the explanation comes from one of them.
>
> Richard Pyle wrote:
>
>> Many thanks for jumping in on this, Dave!
>>
>>
>>>As I think Dave V. and others have pointed out, when an LSID is
>>> resolved,
>>>DNS is used to find the LSID authority.  The LSID authority then
>>> provides
>>>information about how the LSID can be served up (e.g. HTTP, SOAP, FTP),
>>>and where to get the data behind  the LSID and associated metadata.  If
>>> I
>>>start serving up LSIDs with the authority learningsite.com and later
>>>decide that I'm sick of serving up LSIDs, somebody else can take over
>>>serving up the data and the metadata.  However, I (or they) still bear
>>> the
>>> responsibility of running the authority which points to the data. If my
>>>lsids have an authority like lsid.learningsite.com
>>>(urn:lsid:lsid.learningsite.com:foo:bar) then someone else can take over
>>>the authority by taking over lsid.learningsite.com and I can  still have
>>>www.learningsite.com, mail.learningsite.com, etc... for myself. So, with
>>> a
>>>little planning, it's not so hard to deal with an authority going away
>>> as
>>>long as the people running it are responsible.
>>
>
>