From: "Jonathan Rochkind" <rochk...@jhu.edu>
If you want to reclaim the term "federated" to mean a local index, I think you have a losing battle in front of you.
It's not a battle I plan to pursue, I don't fight battles anymore. I just feel obligated to observe that when vocabulary is tinkered with in this fashion -- and I did notice, probably more than ten years ago, that "federated" was being manipulated -- it makes it difficult to express modeling concepts when definitions are a moving target. In the future, vendors should be more careful about messing around with established definitions. If you don't like the federated model (the old one), don't redefine the term, find a new term. The old term could someday come in handy for expressing why you don't like that model, but it's useless if nobody agrees what it means. --Ray
