On 11/11/2013 1:28 PM, Mark H. Wood wrote: > OK, if others see a use for persistent local identifiers then they had > better be persistent. I wasn't thrilled with the idea of overloading > database record IDs either, especially since we'd have to compound > (ID, type) tuples into some string representation, to uniquely > identify an object. > > So, it sounds like what we want is to split the two ways that Handles > are used. One use is as, er, Handles: globally unique persistent > identifiers that mean something outside of the local instance. That > should remain as it is. > > The other use is as locally-unique identifiers of DSOs regardless of > type. For this purpose the prefix is rubbish; unless we have multiple > prefixes for some reason, we only care about the suffix. If this use > were separated from the Handle system entirely then it could be a > simple incrementing numeric label. > > If we can pull these meanings apart, then someone who doesn't want > Handles can, theoretically, unplug them from DSpace and never think > about them again, while DSpace still has something it can use to > uniquely identify things locally.
I think this all seems reasonable to me for 4.0. My only minor disagreement is that it *is* possible to have multiple (handle) prefixes in DSpace. For example: * a DSpace which harvests from other DSpaces (via OAI-PMH/OAI-ORE), all of which have their own Handle prefix, OR * a DSpace which is the 'merger' of two or more previous DSpaces instances (e.g. a consortial DSpace which merged several institutional-based DSpace instances, each of which had their own prefix). Therefore, I'm hesitant to limit the "locally-unique ID" to suffix only -- as I believe that may cause ID collisions in some DSpace instances. I think it needs to remain "[prefix]/[suffix]" until we have something better, like a UUID or similar (as noted in https://jira.duraspace.org/browse/DS-1782). So, I think this means that the REST API needs to support [prefix]/[suffix] for the 4.0 release. Perhaps for 5.0, we can work on minting local object identifiers, which can also be used via REST. - Tim ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ November Webinars for C, C++, Fortran Developers Accelerate application performance with scalable programming models. Explore techniques for threading, error checking, porting, and tuning. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60136231&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Dspace-devel mailing list Dspace-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dspace-devel
