Hi Phil,
> But what if the creator uploads the object to two repositories which
> assign two different identifiers? Nothing wrong with that, until a
> third repository (or resolving service, or cross searching portal)
> gets hold of [metadata for] both copies and needs to work out whether
> they are duplicates [and it will need to work out whether what it has
> are two different metadata records for one resource, or duplicate
> metadata records].
I totally agree with your comments about multiple ids and duplicate and
multiple records. This is digital rights management and appropriate
copy territory and I'm afraid I have no easy answers, surprise, surprise.
I have also heard arguments that every instance of an object and every
instance of a record should indeed have a unique id as they are unique
instances of the object or record, and that the relation fields, should
be used to indicate the relation between the multiple objects and/or
records. However using and maintaining the relations fields is a bit of
a nightmare so I'm not convinced by this idea. I need to give this a
lot more thought......
> There will be ways round this problem, but I think that it would still
> be best to avoid unecessarily multiplicity of object ids. So I would
> suggest that ids need to be allocated as early as possible (ie during
> the creation or the initial publishing of the object) and repositories
> which receive an object with an existing id should not create a new
> id--or (more realistically) if the repository does create a new id, it
> should keep it to itself.
I absolutely agree that repositories should maintain the ids they
receive, or hide any additional ids they create, as you say. How do you
suggest these ids are "allocated" in the first place though? If for
example, a developer uses the new Reload tool to package a learning
object and add metadata to it prior to uploading it to a repository how
will they "allocate" the id?
And of course there's also the interopability issue of how the
repository then deals with the id. Incidentally I liked Ben's idea of
investigating the transfer of identifiers between repositories at the
CodeBash2. I'll get that on the agenda.
Bye
Lorna
>
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>
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> Phil
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--
Lorna M. Campbell
Assistant Director
Centre for Educational Technology Interoperability Standards (CETIS)
Centre for Academic Practice, University of Strathclyde
+44 (0)141 548 3072
http://www.cetis.ac.uk/
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