[Esip-preserve] Distributed Web, identifiers, and stewardship

[Parsons, Mark]

hi all,

Sorry for the cross-posting but I thought this relevant to both stewardship and the citation cluster.

Kelsey Breseman, the new Stewardship Committee co-chair,  ably supported by Rob Brackett,  gave an excellent webinar with an overview of how the Distributed Web works and some of the remaining challenges, many of which are stewardship related.

Slides are here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1R4OXvaMYCG_pGlxRoxJ228OADgV0ZhgKcYEXFFP9Ulk/edit?usp=sharing
and the presentation was recorded.

The issue of validity stood out to me. I think this is a concern that we need to consider more closely in the citation cluster. It has long been suggested that one should use both authority-based and content-based identifiers to specifically reference an object (Altman 2007), and we have seen some of the work that the folks at INREA have done using content-based IDs for some software citation concerns and authority-based IDs for other. We maight want to consider developing some recommended practice in this area. For example, I think key-based addressing could be a helpful way to help with provenance tracking and even the impossible issue of “scientifically equivalent”. They would also offer technically authoritative layers to human identifiers like ORCID. 

There are also issues like how to handle data deprecation, granularity, redirects, high-volume and high-latency data, etc. Apparently the different systems have different approaches to these issues, and it is still early days. Ultimately, however, it is reasonable to assume that at least one of the distributed web protocols will be added to the stack of protocols we already use. It would be good to make sure Earth and environmental science stewardship issues are considered in addressing all these issues.

cheers,

-m.