Re: [Scrollkeeper-devel] Better internationalization support

[<las...@Su...>]

Dan Mueth wrote:
> 
> 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?

Seems like a valid point, we should probably go with the uuidgen then. 

Laszlo