Out of lurk mode for a moment...
(city/job change, new baby, etc. has kept me quiet for awhile)
Dave,
I don't know if you remember my earlier note regarding a NASA Technology
Inventory database I'm working on, but one of the design goals was a
distributed server system with records being sent via http for record
synchronization.
I'm still planning to use HTML tables as a data transmission format for
transmitting database information over the net. As I would desire that
value lists (ie., lookup tables) for various codes be available to the
document, I had planned on using URLs, hopefully graduating to URNs as
they became more utilized. The idea of having an organization like ISO
publish standardized code values would be a welcome standardization
for database developers, and URNs or URIs would seem to be a necessary
component for this to work effectively, especially as code lookups could
conceivably be done live.
For an example on a simplistic scale, the list of 50 states would be
file://iso.org/foo/ISO23-034:US_States.txt
or something like that, eventually replaced with an equivalent URI/URN.
We may be still years away from seeing this become an issue, but it
wouldn't hurt as data systems become more and more decentralized to keep
the universals in mind.
Just a few thoughts...
Murray
BTW, I've been thinking on writing up my "extensions" to HTML tables as
an IETF draft. They aren't a radical shift, just the addition of some
database-type parameters and proposed overall structure for data storage.
Would you be interested in looking over it before it is submitted? Also,
I am not a formal member of the IETF, so I'm a little unsure as to protocol.
_________________________________________
Murray M. Altheim, Systems Analyst
National Technology Transfer Center, Wheeling, West Virginia
email: murray.altheim@nttc.edu