Date: Mon, 18 Oct 93 11:59:27 -0400
From: "Chris Weider" <clw@merit.edu>
Message-Id: <9310181559.AA22644@merit.edu>
To: uri@bunyip.com
Subject: Permanence of URNs
Hi gang:
The first of many UR* messages today as I get caught up on this thread...
In my opinion, the URN should be permanent. We discussed this in both
Columbus and Amsterdam. Electronic citations require permanent URNs and the
committment to maintain these mappings for decades, perhaps even longer.
I agree that this would be a perfect function for libraries, who in the past
have done essentially this function with paper books, where they take a
persistent (and fairly permanent) reference, such as the LOC specification,
and map it into their current holdings. There are two functions that are
listed in the draft Peter and I put out (which, by the way, will be
resent when Peter gets back from Caracas late this week... we have the second
draft essentially finished but need to have a final sanity check), 1)
the ability to provide a persistent, location independent referent for
network objects, and 2) provide for some 'de-duping' where thousands of hits
returned by a resource location service can be whittled down by removing
multple references to the same object. The first function is the most
critical, and the one we need to design for.
Chris Weider