Re: [Uri-review] Allow identifying issues with ISSN NID

[David Booth <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, 2009-05-20 at 20:30 -0400, Daniel R. Tobias wrote:
> On 20 May 2009 at 19:12, David Booth wrote:
> 
> > The owner of a URI space can define whatever syntactic conventions are
> > desired for minting URIs in that URI space, and can publish these
> > conventions just as the conventions for URNs were published.
> 
> How does any of this become normative, authoritive, and binding on 
> anybody including the issuer him/herself?  

The same way it does for standards organizations.  For the most part,
standards organizations only have as much authority as people choose to
give them: most standards are voluntary.  When W3C issues a standard --
what it calls a "Recommendation" -- it has garnered enough community
support, and the W3C has enough respect as a standards body, that many
implementers *choose* to follow it.  When W3C -- and I'm only taking W3C
as an example -- publishes a specification it creates a social
expectation that if others choose to use it, they will do so in
accordance with the specification.  The big difference between you (as
an individual) issuing a specification and the W3C issuing a
specification is one of degree, not kind: the W3C specification is more
authoritative only because people know W3C's reputation.  This, in turn,
creates the social expectation that people *will* faithfully follow the
specification when they claim to be following it.

See the Architecture of the World Wide Web on URI ownership:
http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#uri-ownership

> I own the domain dan.info, 
> and I can issue whatever proclamations I want about URIs within it, 
> like "http://dan.info/dogs/fido" refers to a dog named Fido, but why 
> should anybody regard this as having any standards-level authority, 
> and if the following day I said I was only kidding about that dog 
> stuff, which statement would have more authority?

By doing so dan.info would be establishing itself as unreliable, so
people would be unlikely to use that URI to refer to Fido.

The point is that URNs are not the only *mechanism* that can be used to
establish the URI convention that you want.  http URIs are (in my view)
a superior mechanism to URNs.  But the mechanism is only one part of
establishing the convention.  The important part is to gather sufficient
community support and institutional commitment to back it up, so that it
will have credibility and people will choose to follow it.  And this is
independent of mechanism.


-- 
David Booth, Ph.D.
Cleveland Clinic (contractor)

Opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect those of Cleveland Clinic.