DSHR's Blog: What Is The Point? DSHR's Blog I'm David Rosenthal, and this is a place to discuss the work I'm doing in Digital Preservation. Thursday, April 22, 2021 What Is The Point? During a discussion of NFTs, Larry Masinter pointed me to his 2012 proposal The 'tdb' and 'duri' URI schemes, based on dated URIs. The proposal's abstract reads: This document defines two URI schemes. The first, 'duri' (standing for "dated URI"), identifies a resource as of a particular time. This allows explicit reference to the "time of retrieval", similar to the way in which bibliographic references containing URIs are often written. The second scheme, 'tdb' ( standing for "Thing Described By"), provides a way of minting URIs for anything that can be described, by the means of identifying a description as of a particular time. These schemes were posited as "thought experiments", and therefore this document is designated as Experimental. As far as I can tell, this proposal went nowhere, but it raises a question that is also raised by NFTs. What is the point of a link that is unlikely to continue to resolve to the expected content? Below the fold I explore this question. I think there are two main reasons why duri: went nowhere: The duri: concept implies that Web content in general is not static, but it is actually much more dynamic than that. Even the duri: specification admits this: There are many URIs which are, unfortunately, not particularly "uniform", in the sense that two clients can observe completely different content for the same resource, at exactly the same time. Personalization, advertisements, geolocation, watermarks, all make it very unlikely that either several clients accessing the same URI at the same time, or a single client accessing the same URI at different times, would see the same content. When this proposal was put forward in 2012, it was competing with a less elegant but much more useful competitor that had been in use for 16 years. The duri: specificartion admits that: There are no direct resolution servers or processes for 'duri' or 'tdb' URIs. However, a 'duri' URI might be "resolvable" in the sense that a resource that was accessed at a point in time might have the result of that access cached or archived in an Internet archive service. See, for example, the "Internet Archive" project But the duri: URI doesn't provide the information needed to resolve to the "cached or archived" content. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine uses URIs which, instead of the prefix duri:[datetime]: have the prefix https://web.archive.org/web/[datetime]/. This is more useful, both because browsers will actually resolve these URIs, and because they resolve to a service devoted to delivering the content of the URI at the specified time. The competition for duri: was not merely long established, but also actually did what users presumably wanted, which was to resolve to the content of the specified URL at the specified time. It is true that a user creating a Wayback Machine URL, perhaps using the "Save Page Now" button, would preserve the content accessed by the Wayback Machine's crawler. which might be different from that accessed by the user themselves. But the user could compare the two versions at the time of creation, and avoid using the created Wayback Machine URL if the differences were significant. Publishing a Wayback Machine URL carries an implicit warranty that the creator regarded any differences as insignificant. The history of duri: suggests that there isn't a lot of point in "durable" URIs lacking an expectation that they will continue to resolve to the original content. NFTs have the expectation, but lack the mechanism necessary to satisfy the expectation. Posted by David. at 8:00 AM Labels: personal digital preservation, web archiving No comments: Post a Comment Newer Post Older Post Home Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom) Blog Rules Posts and comments are copyright of their respective authors who, by posting or commenting, license their work under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Off-topic or unsuitable comments will be deleted. DSHR DSHR in ANWR Recent Comments Full comments Blog Archive ▼  2021 (18) ▼  April (5) Dogecoin Disrupts Bitcoin! What Is The Point? 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