Reviews
Recent Press Coverage
iPhylo. "
BHL and DOIs", 25 October 2007. Blog entry by Roderic Page.
BBC News. "
The Tech Lab: Bradley Horowitz", 29 June 2007. Bradley Horowitz, responsible for novel technology development at search giant Yahoo, looks ahead to the "internet of things". [
See quote.]
"The [DNS] service translates yahoo.com into a specific IP address so I don't
get mistakenly sent to another website. We do that very well for resolving domain names but we don't do it very well in the real world for resolving entities. What do we mean by entity? Frankly almost anything qualifies: a person, a place or a thing, real world and digital objects, even concepts or ideas. ...As an industry we're picking off these domains one-by-one, but we will need increased cooperation and standards for solving problems like identity."
Bradley Horowitz,
The Tech Lab. BBC News, 29 June 2007.
"
Although Tim Berners-Lee once famously declared that "Cool URIs don't change," factors beyond our control make it hard for most of us to avoid link rot. Geoffrey Bilder is the director of strategic initiatives for CrossRef, a company whose mission is "to be the citation linking backbone for all scholarly information in electronic form." CrossRef, in other words, is in the business of combating link rot.
The world of scholarly and professional publishing revolves around reliable citation. In previous podcasts with Tony Hammond and Dan Chudnov I've explored some of the technologies and methods used by these publishers --
including digital object identifiers and OpenURL -- to assure that reliability.
CrossRef plays a key role in that technological ecosystem. In this conversation, Geoffrey and I discuss how everyday blog publishing systems could offer the same kinds of persistence, integrity, and accountability provided by scholarly and professional publishing systems. And we explore why that might matter more than most people would think."
Jon Udell,
ITConversations. Interview with Geoffrey Builder, CrossRef. "
Winning the Battle Against Linkrot", April 2007.
"Simplicity and utility -- a judgement of
StatLink by one of our readers. And now we are further encouraged by winning a
Highly Commended Award from ALPSP. We want to make it easier for all readers to use our analytical and data publications, whether from a printed page or from a computer screen. With DOI-driven
Statlinks we think we've hit on a winning solution to enable readers to go beyond the limits of the page and access the numbers underlying a chart or graph. It's great that our readers and now ALPSP seem to agree!"
Toby Green, Head of Dissemination and Marketing, OECD Publishing
"Another interesting new area for grid security is the growing discussion around developing
a handle system for the grid. This
Handle System could be an alternative implementation
that you could use for attribution servers and naming servers in general. The handle
system, which is being worked on by the
Corporation for National Research Initiatives
(CRNI), would not only provide attribute services but it would also serve as an
infrastructure and root service able to resolve resource names globally. It is very much a
domain name system (DNS) type of model. You have a global naming system and values
or attributes that are bound to that name. It's like the DNS on steroids -- security is truly
integrated into the whole fabric. It will have all the good features of transparent
applications, and it allows individuals to administer their own bindings, so you can push
the access rights of the bindings down to the individual names."
"The concept of having a centralized root system for registering grid resources is
interesting, as we consider the future of 'extra-grids,' where coordinated resource sharing
requires us to think about distributed policy requirements and resource discovery issues."
"Managing millions of domain names was a tremendous challenge, but the idea of
accounting for billions of resources participating in a global grid is mind-numbing ... Having
the inventory of resources consolidated in a central broker seems like a logical step to
solving the issues. One lesson I've learned from the bad-boy days of the early commercial
Internet is that harnessing distributed power is not so much a matter of leveraging the
sum of the individual components but of building an appropriate framework so that each
constituent can derive value from the whole without being forced to make one-off tactical
decisions in the enterprise. Building a handle system empowers the lowest management
point in the organization to fully utilize the technology without constantly building
organizational consensus."
InfoWorld, GRID METER,
Three Networking/Grid computing questions for Vint Cerf, "
What Would a Grid Domain Name System Look Like?", posted 14 September by Greg Nawrocki
"3. Do you see any possible future directions for how resources (both hardware and software)
are registered, discovered and identified in Grid environments? Will there be a next-gen
resource registry (like the DNS on steroids)?"
"Vint Cerf: There certainly could be a higher level of resource registration. I would expect
that registration of services would want to be bound to an identifier space that is well
above IP addresses. These identifiers could be found to IP addresses dynamically or they
could be bound to domain names that are in turn bound to IP addresses. But one would
want the identifiers to survive changes in the IP layer. Examples of such bindings can
already be found in instant messaging services such as ICQ, MSN, AIM and the like. There,
the instant messaging identifiers are bound dynamically to the IP addresses of the clients.
These change with time and the systems are generally very adaptive to these changes. I
think the Grid environment needs to have similar flexibility. One might turn to the Object
Identifier community for some insights into the possible uses of new classes of identifiers
for service and data objects."
InfoWorld, GRID METER, "
Three Networking/Grid computing questions for Vint Cerf", September 13, 2005, posted by Greg Nawrocki.
"The governance of the DNS will not completely encompass future Internet
addressing and navigation, which is a good thing, not a shortcoming. The
system of domain names, IP numbers, root servers and protocol
identifiers is not static but a technology capable of evolving into a
better form. As such, the current system should not be treated as
sacrosanct, but amenable to innovation. The paradox of Internet
governance is that any institutional arrangement will by nature be a
collusion of political power and financial interests that acts to freeze
into place the current technical design, and make new and better
approaches almost impossible to emerge -- much as the system of national
telecom operators dominated communications for a century until the
Internet emerged as the unlikely force that upended it. We can already
see that future Internet navigation will not simply be addresses linked
to computers, but to billions of devices, file-documents, real-time
video and audio streams, objects though RFID tags, and even constantly
changing instantiations of information -- all which will make today's DNS
and its governance seem anachronistic. Allowing for alternative
addressing and navigation across the network, alongside a sanctioned
'legacy' DNS, will be a balanced way to achieve diversity,
experimentation and progress, while also ensuring stability and
reliability."
Kenneth Neil Cukier (Technology Correspondent, The Economist) at the OII
Forum on Internet Governance, 6 May 2005
STUDY SHOWS ONLINE CITATIONS DON'T AGE WELL:
A study conducted by two academics at Iowa State University has shown a
remarkably high rate of "decay" for online citations. Michael Bugeja,
professor of journalism and communication, and Daniela Dimitrova,
assistant professor of communication, looked at five prestigious
communication-studies journals from 2000 to 2003 and found 1,126
footnotes that cite online resources. Of those, 373 did not work at
all, a decay rate of 33 percent; of those that worked, only 424 took
users to information relevant to the citation. In one of the journals
in the study, 167 of 265 citations did not work. Bugeja compared the
current situation to that of Shakespearean plays in the early days of
printing, when many copies of plays were fraught with errors due to the
instability of the printing medium. Anthony T. Grafton, a professor of
history at Princeton University and author of a book on footnotes,
agreed that citation decay is a real and growing problem, describing
the situation as "a world in which documentation and verification melt
into air."
Chronicle of Higher Education, 14 March 2005 (sub. req'd)
http://chronicle.com/prm/daily/2005/03/2005031402n.htm
Updated 2 April 2008
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