Domain names and persistence: Process and goals

Henry S. Thompson
W3C
University of Edinburgh
Markup Systems
8 December 2011

1. Why are we here?

Digital material accessible on the Web has names

Those names get their meaning in two ways, mostly:

So, in either case, ownership matters

And the relevant standards say for many URI schemes (past, present, and, we should anticipat, future)

So it is at least commonly supposed

2. Domain ownership impermanence

It would appear, then, that any threat to permanent ownership of domain names

So many different constituencies have an interest in mitigating such threats

Most of those constituencies are represented here today

3. Goals for this exercise

The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) TAG (Technical Architecture Group) is charged with stewardship of the architecture of the Web

So we care about the properties of URIs

And Jonathan and I, in the context of our TAG membership, have been struggling with the whole permanence thing for some years now

So we asked people to come talk about this

No good deed goes unpunished

4. Workshop goals

Our goal for this workshop is simple:

That means, we think, identifying dimensions, and points on those dimensions

Candidate dimensions:

5. Rules of engagement

This is will be a workshop

The chairs will be ruthless in keeping speakers to their allotted times in the morning.

We'll be running two projectors in the morning:

6. Process

At the moment we envisage the outcome as something like a matrix,

In the first instance the organisers will fill in the wiki in real time during the talks, based on