On Sep 24, 2008, at 2:08 AM, Jeroen van der Ham wrote:
Aaron Brown wrote:
There are reasons for a bulkier, less context-sensitive identifier scheme, but I'm not sure the NML list is the right place to hash this out since the identifier schemes are relevant more for lookup and distribution than basic description.
What do you mean by distribution in this case?
If this is going to be used in a global context, and not just from a local one - then the information that it 'exists' may need to be propagated to other places. (Consider path finding.)
For the sake of NML, i'd prefer to leave it at "identifiers are globally unique strings".
I compeletely agree with that. I've tried to hammer this point down at a GLIF meeting last year as well. I am all for leaving the form of the identifiers up to the people creating them. There are lots and lots of ways to create a globally unique identifier and everybody has their preference. I really don't care what they choose as long as it is *globally unique*.
They become much more useful if everyone is using the same algorithms to produce them.
But, I do have to add one restriction to that clause. The globally unique string should be just an identifier, nothing more. That means no implicit type information, no implicit location information, no implicit source information, nothing. The globally unique string must identify a resource, about which more things can be stated using NML.
Here I disagree 100%. That is like saying that FQDN's should not have any structure or implicit type information etc... If a circuit exists, but no one can find it, is it useful? Obviously you could come up with a central repository of all circuit id's and relate them to location information. But, that has pretty annoying scaling issues. Especially, when we have a fairly clear topological model available for how to distribute this information. jeff