Ownership of Names (was Re: Public identifiers and topic maps)

[W. Eliot Kimber]

At 07:10 PM 9/28/98 -0500, Steven R. Newcomb wrote:
>> From: John Cowan <cowan at locke.ccil.org>
>> Consider John 3:14 (in the KJV version, to be concrete). 
>> What is an FPI I can use for it?  I have the same unpalatable
>> alternatives: "-//John Cowan//NONSGML KJV John 3:14//EN", which
>> is a name I own but which is embarrassingly non-public, or
>> "-//King James I of England//NONSGML John 3:14", which belongs
>> to a man who is unlikely to register any names.
>
>What John said.  This is the problem we're trying to address with
>"public topics".

Again, I don't agree. How is "-//John Cowan//NONSGML KJV John 3:14//EN" any
different from "-//Some Name//NONSGML 12345ABCD//EN" if they both happen to
be mapped to the Bible verse John 3:14?  They're just arbitrary names. The
fact that your arbitrary name happens to contain a string that one might
guess, in the abscence of an explicit mapping, refers to a Bible verse, is
irrelevant.  I can't *know* it refers to a Bible verse until you provide a
mapping.  It could just as easily be a reference to a memo from Ken
Jeramiah Verhoven to John Cowan sent at 3:14.

Assigning your own names to things is just cataloging, nothing more.  If
the Dewey Decimal system had conformed to ISO 9070, all our library catalog
entries would be of the form:

-//Dewey::Catalog//DOCUMENT 301 Title, Author//EN

But Dewey doesn't own the books, just the cataloging system for them.

So why should you be denied the same opportunity to define a classification
scheme as Dewey?

Cheers,

E.

--
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W. Eliot Kimber, Senior Consulting SGML Engineer
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