# Re: URN single or multiple variants

Keith Moore (moore@cs.utk.edu)
Thu, 16 Sep 1993 14:21:44 -0400

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    Message-Id: <9309161821.AA19826@thud.cs.utk.edu>

    From: Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu>

    To: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)

    Subject: Re: URN single or multiple variants

    In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 16 Sep 1993 02:37:13 CDT."

                 <9309160737.AA17984@wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu>

    Date: Thu, 16 Sep 1993 14:21:44 -0400

Marc Andreessen writes:

> My argument would be that since an image in GIF format and an image in
> JPEG format are the exact same piece of *intellectual property*, they
> deserve the same URN -- and by extension, likewise for all pieces of
> intellectual property that exist in multiple formats containing the
> same intellectual content. I want to look for intellectual property
> on the network, not "GIF images" or "JPEG images"; I want the
> mechanics of which file format the intellectual property is in to be
> largely irrelevant to operations on and with pointers to that piece of
> intellectual property; and I generally want my client to automatically
> choose the most appropriate format for me after it has located the
> intellectual property that I want. All this seems to point to (a).

I guess I draw a distinction between *conversion* from one representation to
another and a document that is available in different representations.

There are two "official" representations of RFC 1341, of which the PostScript
version is more faithful to what the authors intended (notwithstanding the
rules that say the ASCII RFC should be authoritative). If I'm looking for
RFC 1341, I want to get the Postscript version if my viewer can handle it
(and I can spare the bandwidth), and the plain text version only if it
cannot. I would treat these as two separate documents, with different URNs,
and tie them together at the citation level.

On the other hand, if I'm looking for a document that was "published" as
image/gif, I don't want a server to claim that there's an image/jpeg
representation of the document available just because it's capable of
converting the document to jpeg (or has a "cached" copy of the converted
document lying around).

(I don't mind if it tells me it's willing to do such a conversion, but I need
to know which representation is the original form.) For this case, I would
have one URN, corresponding to the "published" document. If I were caching
that document, I would want it in its original format. Otherwise it might be
subject to more conversions later, causing lossage.

Keith

P.S. My example is somewhat strained...because of course the original of rfc
1341 is in Andrew format (right, Nathaniel?) ...which produced the other two
representations...but in this case the *published* versions are in PostScript
and ASCII.

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