[ogsa-wg] BES query

[Dave Berry]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tom Maguire [mailto:tmaguire at 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.