[osis-core] <identifier>

[Todd Tillinghast]

Patrick, Troy, and Chris,

First, I believe that Patrick and Steve are strongly against the Bible
Technologies group acting as a naming authority.  (Please correct me if
I misstate your position.)  As such creating systems of identifiers for
works is left to other organizations.  

In order to identify the organization/system of identifiers/naming
authority, it is necessary to _qualify_ an identifier.  Because Bible
Technologies will not be acting in that role "osis" is not an
appropriate qualifier.  (That is not to say that type="OSIS" OR
type="unique" would not be useful to identify which of the possibly many
<identifier> elements should be used programmatically to identify a
work.)

In the case of sermons that are being shared, exactly Troy's proposed
syntax is what I would propose only that it should be expressed in the
context of a naming system.  Perhaps Crosswire would act as a naming
authority for first and last names and allow the person who is allocated
that first and last name to use any period delimited extension after
that they desire.  The identifier would then be <identifier
type="unique">crosswire: Griffitts.Troy.Sermon.20031026</identifier>
indicating the context in which the identifier is unique.  (Or they can
be their own naming authority using either their domain or their email
address.)

Because no unique <identifier> element is required, so people creating
personal documents need not provide an identifier that is registered
with a naming authority.  If a pastor where to put a sermon in a common
_repository_ and no unique identifier was specified the _repository_
could assign a unique value at the point of acquisition.

What we have not identified is how the work that IS the prefix is
uniquely identified.  Perhaps this is the missing link.
fba:Bible.es.RVR.1960 is not a globally unique name but something like
fba.org:Bible.es.RVR.1960 is unique if fba.org is a domain name.  If we
were to encode the following:

<osisText osisIDWork="rvr" ...>
   <header>
      <work osisWork="rvr">
         ...
         <identifier type="unique">fba:Bible.es.RVR.1960</identifier>
         ...
      </work>
      <work osisWork="fba">
         <title>Forum of Bible Agencies Bible Translation
Identifiers</title>
         <identifier type="unique">urn:fba.org</identifier>
      </work>
   </header>
</osisText>

Where we specify that "urn" is a predefined prefix for domain names
registered with ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers)

We could also do:
<identifier type="unique">url:fra.org/TranslationNames</identifier>
AND
<identifier type="unique">mailto:name@abc.com</identifier> for
individuals to self identify themselves.

Questions:
1) Does type="unique" more clearly express what we are trying to say
with type="OSIS"?  (I can go with either value.)
2) Do you agree that there is a need for a prefix to qualify the context
in which the identifier is unique?
3) Does the unique identifier in the prefix defining work help clarify?
4) Would it help if we were to say that if no work is defined for a
prefix value that the prefix value is a urn of a registered domain?

Todd