I am a cynic and a skeptic and a pessimist, and I’m aware of it. So it’s no surprise to me–and if you’ve been reading for long, probably not to you, either–that I have very little hope for the URN or DOI idea ever really working out. (That is, the idea of giving every digital object a unique identifier, along the same lines as an ISBN/ISSN, instead of relying on URLs, which are subject to change. An important point about these identifiers: they wouldn’t necessarily specify where to go to get any given Digital Object; they might just make one clearly discernible from another. Or a URN might resolve to multiple URLs.) I think managing something on that scale–a scale greater than that of DNS/URLs, since each object would be identified, not just each server–is going to be, to put it very plainly, more trouble than it’s worth. There would be benefits to such a system, if it were ever fully deployed, sure, but how could it be done meaningfully?
Is this blog post a Digital Object (in the sense of having its own identifier or URN, in the hypothetical scenario where there is such a scheme)? And if I change it a year from now because I think my writing style is embarrassingly informal, has it become a different Digital Object? If you copy it down and put it into your blog–hopefully with attribution–is it the same Digital Object or a different one? (By my reading, it’s the same, at least in the URN scheme. But when I go back and change my wording, it won’t change the wording of the copy on your blog.)
As the authors of this article say, near the end, there’s an awful lot left unresolved about this whole set of ideas. I think it’s very pie-in-the-sky, a bit like Semantic Web. (Yeah, i went there.)
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