Quoting Andy Powell <[log in to unmask]>:
> DCMI spent a long while praparing the groundwork for building a
> centralised registry of DCMI 'encoding schemes' but eventually gave up
> when it became apparent that non-one wanted to take operational or legal
> responsibility for its maintenance. More importantly, we realsied that
> because DCMI uses URIs to name its encoding schemes (DCMI uses URIs to
> name all its metadata terms) the Web effectively becomes the registry.
> If I want to name a new encoding scheme then I simply create a new
> globally unique URI for it (in the bit of URI space that I own) and start
> using it! That leaves ICAAN with the problem of determining who owns
> which bits of URI-space.
Yes. And within this model, it starts to become possible (yes, agreements about
various other things are necessary too, but the devolved assignment of globally
unique names is a fundamental building block) for applications like the IEMSR
(and other similar services) to behave as applications that expose/"surface"
(some subset of) the metadata describing vocabularies/encoding schemes (and
indeed other stuff) which is globally distributed/managed in a devolved
fashion.
Applications like the IEMSR can offer functions based on the aggregation of that
information (possibly combined with other classes of information drawn from
other sources). And other applications and services can offer _other_ functions
of interest to their community based on some other subset of the same data.
Pete
-------
Pete Johnston
Research Officer (Interoperability)
UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK
tel: +44 (0)1225 383619 fax: +44 (0)1225 386838
mailto:[log in to unmask]
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/p.johnston/
|