Re: [Scrollkeeper-devel] Better internationalization support

[Dan M. <da...@ea...>]

On Fri, 20 Apr 2001, Laszlo Kovacs wrote:

> So I thought maybe an OMF URN version field should be added, like:
> 
> urn:x-omf:omf-urn-version:organization:group:name:version:language:format 
> 
> where omf-urn-version is for internal purpose to track changes in our
> URN structure. Although we could also use x-omf1, x-omf2 etc instead of
> x-omf. Do people think this would be useful?

So, we would have:

urn:x-omf1:organization:group:name:version:language:format

where organization will normally be a domain and group is whatever the
coordinators for that domain choose (package, project, etc.)

The part of this which will be used to identify a series of a document
(different versions, formats, and languages) is:

urn:x-omf1:organization:group:name

Note that this means that a document cannot be moved between organizations
or groups or it will lose its "identity". (eg. an organization changes its
name, a document changes groups such as by being moved into a different
package, etc. ) The versions before the move will belong to a different
series from those versions after the move.  Fundamentally, the part of the
URN which describes the series should never change, even if the old labels
no longer accurately describe the document, because this part of the URN
is being used to identify the document series.

So, we have a few choices here:

1) Use the URN's as if they are metadata and change the URN if the
organization, doc name, or doc group changes.  This undermines the purpose
of having a document series identifier.  We could do it anyway and just
live with a certain level of breakage in the system, but this does not
seem like The Right Way.  

2) Try to enforce that once the document series portion of the URN is set,
it should not be changed.  This is the behavior one expects from a
document series identifier.  However, it seems odd since the URN looks
like metadata and people would not want "incorrect" metadata.  Plus, most
people will probably not realize they should not change this part and
change it anyway.

3) Go back to using the uuidgen system (or some other system) for series
id's.  Note that we may still use URN's for unique document identifiers.
We would be going back to the original plan of having two identifiers: one
for the doc series and one as a unique resource identifier.  If we do
this, we would have to seperately evaluate whether URN's or uuidgen are
better for the unique document identifiers.

4) ???

Although I had really warmed up to the URN idea, I see this as a serious
problem. I don't see #1 or #2 as proper solutions.  My inclination at this
point it to use #3.

Thoughts?

Dan