On Authorities...

[Tom McGlynn]

Niall Gaffney wrote:
> One concept we are debating is how much real world information goes into 
> the identifier and how much you have to go look up using the identifier 
> and some registry. Some of us seem to want lots, others none.
> 
> Your email analogy is exactly why I would hope we would not put any sort 
> of real world information in there.  Your email example points this out 
> clearly. This is why having an email address in on a paper is often 
> worthless after 2 years (the lifetime of many PostDocs).  Were we to 
> have an astronomer registry we could use that ID instead and if you 
> needed to contact the person you could (in fact thats how it works with 
> the AAS registry only we use the persons name which often does the trick).
> 

I think there's a slight confusion of two issues here as I mentioned
is response to Arnold: who is responsible for the translation
of the URI (or whatever) to the current URL and what is the syntax
of the URI.  You are absolutely right that the ApJ (or UChigago press)
or some other institution would maintain the registry of astronomers,
but I don't think we're going to get text like

    "For reprints contact 14789436 at apjmaillist.org"

rather we're going to get

    "For reprints contact TomMcGlynn at apjmaillist.org"

For printed articles at least, I don't believe the ApJ can
change the text on the page.  They could use the current
address in an electronic rendition, but since these may
get printed it seems like a bad idea.

The second string is much more understandable and useful (and a lot
less likely to lead to misaddressed mail).  The ApJ may well
have asked me to provide the permanent identifier believing
that I'm best able to give a string the users will easily
comprehend.  Were I my boss, I might find that NickWhite was
not be specific enough and want something a little more complete.

The ApJ or whoever is maintaing
the registry still needs to somehow update my mailing address
but that is a separate issue.

So I think the ID (at least as seen by humans) still encodes
meaning.  To the extent that I'm a persistent entity
compared to a particular E-mail address!

	Cheers,
	Tom