Lutz Maicher tweeted about Identifier Persistence: Fundamentals yesterday.
It claims two foundations for identifier persistence:
- Identifier persistence requires an organizational commitment. Persistence cannot be ensured by a few renegades in the skunk-works, nor can it be mandated from on high without the support of those who manage the identifiers or produce web resources. All individuals involved in the life-cycle of web resources must be committed to persistence in perpetuity if true persistence of identifiers is to be achieved.
- No technology, no standard, no identifier scheme, no information architecture will get you persistence. Whether you choose native URIs, Handles, DOIs, PURLs, ARKs, UUIDs, or XRIs, you will never achieve identifier persistence without active management of your identifiers and web resources. This requires the aforementioned organizational commitment since such management cannot occur without sufficient resources. Management of web resources and identifiers requires time and due diligence and those don’t come for free.
(emphasis in original)
So, identifier persistence requires active management of identifiers and web resources?
But when I think of persistent identifiers, I have something more like:
in mind. (
Trevor Lowe)
It has been, what?, over 2,000 years without active management of identifiers and web resources and it still persists as an identifier.
And that is a fairly recent identifier in the great scheme of identifiers. There are those that are far older.
I don’t deny the convenience or utility of web identifiers. But in terms of persistence, where should we look for a digital Rosetta stone when the maintenance of opaque identifiers and 303 redirects have fallen into disuse? I have heard it mentioned that fifteen or twenty years is persistence for a web identifier. Perhaps so but realize that the persistence of the identifier for Cleopatra that appears above is more than two orders of magnitude greater.
How your business would be different today if there were a cone of information darkness only fifteen or twenty years (optimistic estimate) behind you? And with each passing year, another year drops into a digital abyss. Some things persist, others don’t. Usually the ones you want/need don’t. Or so it always seems.
My suggestion isn’t yet-another-persistence-proposal (YAPP). The ones that involve multi-century funding/staffing and proposals to bind future generations to our present notions of persistence syntax.
Let’s write web identifiers using (in part) identifiers that are already meaningful in our professions, occupations and hobbies. Identifiers that are not dependent particular resolution mechanisms or technologies. Identifiers that will persist long after their maintenance has failed. That is a step towards persistence.
Interesting post. I have two comments:
1) The users of those symbols were a community with a very strong shared context. It was not easy to become a writer in ancient egypt. The usage of the symbols was not free to anyone. There was no anarchic reuse of identifiers. You had to go through a homogenization procedure (education). If it would not have been that way and anybody could have written texts by using those symbols, we probably would still be wondering what those texts mean. I am sure even with the coordination effort there was enough diversity in symbol usage over time. I am wondering if two thousand years from now – given that there is a partial cultural reboot – the text corpus that we created will be easier or harder to decrypt than the one of ancient egypt.
2) It was not only the rosetta stone that made the decryption possible. There was vast knowledge about that time transported in other readable documents that Jean Francois Champollion had studied in advance. Without that knowledge it would have been also impossible to decrypt the texts. I am sure there is examples of absolutely dead writing systems. In any case the majority of mankind will never be able to read those texts and the ones that do want to must put a lot of effort into learning that symbol system.
Comment by robert_cerny — May 28, 2011 @ 2:46 am
Robert,
On “anarchic reuse of identifiers,” actually there are texts from the New Kingdom (remember we are talking about 2,000+ years of language usage) that pretty clearly indicate the scribes could not read what they were copying from older texts. Passages get intermixed, etc.
And that was for Middle Kingdom texts. Old Kingdom fared even more poorly.
My point was that the identifier does not depend upon a mechanistic resolution system. Or to put it positively, it depends upon a human resolution mechanism.
Sure, decryption took more than the Rosetta Stone but I am not sure how interesting a full description would be to my usual readers. 😉
On absolutely dead languages (or thought so by most) see Linear A.
Learning any language requires a lot of effort, although I am hopeful that better insight into learning styles will enable greater readership of languages, both modern and ancient.
Here’s a funny thought: Pick some popular programming language and cast its teaching into the same style as natural language instruction.
Comment by Patrick Durusau — May 29, 2011 @ 6:23 am