OK, that makes some sense. I assume then that if I have 1 million handles (which is not outside the relm of possiblity for the project) that I can use a batch process to update all of those if, for some reason, it becomes necessary?
While it's not excatly what we were thinking, I can see that there is some value added by the Handle System.
Thanks for all the replies.
Tim Donnelly
Systems/Network Administrator
Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries
(303)759-3399 x106
On Fri Mar 23 6:10 , handle-info-request@cnri.reston.va.us sent:
Message: 2
To: handle-info@cnri.reston.va.us
Subject: Re: [Handle-info] Please help me understand the value of Handle
From: Michael Judd <m.judd@griffith.edu.au>
Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2007 10:04:48 +1000
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Hi Tim,
I'm no handle expert but here goes...
Handles are just updatable mappings to URLs.
They allow you to publish URLs to documents that, as long as you maintain
the mapping, will always resolve.
So in your example, originally you might have given the URL
http://hdl.handle.net/98765/todo to someone so that they could see the
document at http://shield.mydomain.org/todo.txt.
(Any handle server should be able to resolve any handle, but since handle
servers themselves are suseptable to hostname changes etc. you should use
the cnri handle server (hdl.handle.net) when giving out handle URLs as it
is guaranteed not to change.)
Back to your example, after your hostname change you would update
98765/todo to point to http://dagger.mydomain.org/todo.txt so that
everyone who went to http://hdl.handle.net/98765/todo would continue to
see the correct document.
Originally you may have had another document at http://
whatever.mydomain.org/whatever.txt that you created the handle
http://hdl.handle.net/98765/whatever for. This handle will still be valid
as long as http://whatever.mydomain.org/whatever.txt points to the
document.
Handles with the same prefix (98765) don't have to resolve to the same
server. The prefix is just used to locate the actual handle server.
Using DNS cnames and aliases you can keep URLs that simply move servers or
change hostnames resolving. But what happens if an organizations domain
name changes? Or what happens if the repository software the documents
exist in changes, and all the relative links change? This is where the
value of handles and other persistant URL schemes come.
That's how I see it anyway. :)
Cheers!
Regards,
Michael Judd
Nathan Campus, Griffith University.
Brisbane 4111. Australia.
m.judd@griffith.edu.au
07 3735 3801