[IETF-IDRM] Re: [IDRM] draft-irtf-idrm-handle-system-00.txt

[Thomas Hardjono]

At 5/25/01||11:17 AM, Mark Baugher wrote:
>Thanks for the clarification, Larry.  I have another question.
>
>At 09:28 AM 5/25/2001 -0400, Larry Lannom wrote:
>>I'll let Sam answer the hard questions, but I believe your second point 
>>goes fairly directly to the 'semantically meaningful naming authority 
>>issue.' If the naming authority moving from X to Y is 10.3692 then the 
>>revealed information is a little obscure. If you have a good memory or 
>>access to administrative logs you may be able to tell that the 
>>handle10.3692/abc used to be owned and administered by X but has now 
>>moved to Y. If the handle was JohnWileyAndSons.JournalDivision/abc then 
>>the situation is a little more confusing. This has been the subject of a 
>>good deal of discussion over the years and I strongly encourage 
>>non-semantic naming authorities. The commercial publishing world, as an 
>>example, instinctively understands and supports this approach (cf.
>>ISBNs) and in the DOI world we have already had at least one instance of 
>>a block of handles moving from one owner to another with no apparent 
>>problems (American Chemical Society selling a journal to Wiley). So there 
>>are two potential problems with the transfer of ownership of Handles or 
>>Handle NAs: 1) semantically meaningful NAs and 2) splitting a set of 
>>handles under one NA across two or more owners who want to administer 
>>their handles on different local handle services - this is possible 
>>because the granularity of ownership is at the individual handle level 
>>and a potential problem because clients are directed to local services by 
>>the global root based on NA. This situation hasn't arisen (all DOIs, 
>>e.g., are in a single local service) but could be forbidden by local 
>>service policy (the DOI choice) or by providing clients with 
>>non-deterministic answers. This potential problem was a direct trade-off 
>>for 1) allowing local services and 2) putting ownership granularity at 
>>the handle level. So far it seems like the right choice.
>
>A big question for me is what happens when John Wiley, let's say they are 
>naming authority "167," transfers ownership of a work to Springer-Verlag 
>who are "203."  Since the work is prefixed with 167 forever, doesn't that 
>mean that John Wiley's naming authority will always get queried for this 
>work?  That the trust and security for this work will reside with a John 
>Wiley server and not with a Springer server?  Or will the John Wiley 
>server always need to redirect the client to the Springer server?  If so, 
>hopefully Springer won't sell it or it won't be sold many times - or else 
>the client will be chasing around the Internet for awhile.
>
>thanks, Mark

Larry, Sam,

I had a similar question about non-semantic naming authorities, and
I have accepted the reasoning that Sam put forward (and now clarified
again by Larry).

In the case of moving NAs, Does it make sense to simply concatenate NA numbers
as sub-NAs (parsing from right-to-left), creating a path upward to the
root NA (ie. similar to CAs and jurisdictions)?

cheers,

thomas
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