

Persistent Identifiers: Considering the Options - gnosis
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/tonkin/

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olefoo
Cool URI's don't change.

Slightly less cool URI's leave 301 redirects behind when they move.

At the web scale you can't expect every org publishing resources to keep them
up indefinitely, you need to be able to deal with breakage.

~~~
gnosis
There are several different issues here. One is persistent _access_ , which is
what you seem to be referring to. Some others are _metadata_ , along with
persistent _naming_ and _location_.

It's important to be able to name something uniquely and get some metadata
about it, even if that thing can't be located and/or accessed. Some of the
schemes discussed in the article are designed to address these issues.

~~~
olefoo
Yes. And there are reasons for decoupling certain classes of identifiers from
the DNS. But, for many of the entities we deal with on a daily basis that is a
useless bit of metacrap.

Dealing with metadata takes effort, for things that exist outside of the web
that effort is worthwhile. For things that exist purely on the web, the URI is
all the unique ID that is required, and if you need to move it to a different
location in the namespace you can do so.

A web page or blog post is uniquely identified at a point in time by being
retrievable from a URL. If at some later date that URL becomes nonfunctional
or changes meaning that resource no longer exists. You can still refer to it
by it's URI even though it is not retrievable using the URI as a URL.

I agree with you, it's just that unnecessary indirection offends my aesthetic
sensibilities.

