-----Original Message----- From: Tom Maguire [mailto:tmaguire@us.ibm.com] Sent: 31 August 2005 14:51 Subject: Re: [ogsa-wg] BES query
The other major camp places a high priority on implementer and application freedom to use different reference formats. It considers that references always exist in some implicit relational model (maintained by applications, communities, etc.) where interesting or important identity attributes are maintained. As such, the references themselves do not need to express identity for interop.
Yes, Distributed Computing 101. If you authoritatively want to test if two things are the same you MUST ask the things.
The W3C Technical Architecture Group have a document called "The Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One" (http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-webarch-20041215/). This states "URIs that are identical, character by character, refer to the same resource". I don't see why this should cause a problem.
The real difficulty for me (and implementers) is the "universal" context in which these identities live. One of the reasons that hierarchical namespace lookups exist is because they are capable of massively scaling.
Well, any given URI scheme can be hierarchic, so you could just restrict yourself to such schemes. In any case, it's not clear to me that there's a problem here - isn't this question of scale one of lookup (i.e. registering/discovery)? Abstract names don't address this; all they promise is that if you have two abstract names that are the same, they denote the same thing. You should be able to build a hierarchic lookup system via the resolver EPRs. What does concern me about the three-level naming scheme is what happens if I have one sort of name "in my hand" and the interface that I'm calling wants a different one. This is another way of saying that the naming scheme is core to the entire architecture. I would like to see a document that explains the naming architecture, in much the same way that the W3C document does. In the meantime, my worry is that we seem to be trying to satisfy both camps, and are therefore in danger of building incompatible systems on top of the same specification. Dave.