RE: infoURI standard officially blessed

From: Matthew Cockerill <matt_at_biomedcentral.com>
Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 18:25:43 -0000

I think that the issue below is the key one.

But from my perspective, the separation of concerns is a fantasic bonus, as it means that we can set up the identifiers in a certain way and stick to it. Meaning that we can then accumulate lots of lovely semantic information over time (such an unambiguous metadata telling us which book is which) and it remains valid.

Meanwhile, the best tools for resolution will change over the years and decades to come. Right now, there are all sorts of ways you might choose to resolve an ISBN (through Amazon, through an out of print book locator service, through the library of congress, through Google Print).
You and your browser and/or your semantic web enabled tools can make that choice for yourself. And as new options become available in the future, they too become available to you as alternate resolution mechanisms, and none of them needs to be privileged as *the* official one.
No single resolution service could capture all these possibilities.

Matt


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Stefano Mazzocchi [mailto:stefanom_at_mit.edu]
> Sent: 14 November 2005 18:17
> To: general_at_simile.mit.edu
> Subject: Re: infoURI standard officially blessed
>

> You are promoting to separate the identification from the
> location concerns.
>
> I completely understand why this is appealing (it makes
> indentification
> a lot easier), but I can't stop thinking this is a mistake: the
> equivalent would be to enter a huge building full of
> unordered books and
> divide the workforce in two, one that works on giving an
> identifier for
> all the books and one that works on ways to find them.... if
> they don't
> talk *while* they are doing it, it's going to be harder to find those
> books later, not easier.
>
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Received on Mon Nov 14 2005 - 18:20:57 EST

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