another reason to use numerical id-space designators

[Jonathan Rees]

I've had a longstanding action item to write down considerations
regarding the alphabetic vs. numeric id-space designator issue. To
satisfy it I've added the below text to the wiki page
http://sharedname.org/page/Issue/Id-space_names_or_identifiers .

<snip>
Users like alphabetic id-space designators because they're easy to
read and to remember, and databank owners like them because they give
exposure to their brand name.

[...]

Using numerical designators would protect the Shared Names system
against possible threats related to ownership of a brand. The
ownership could be of either the legal kind of the "moral" kind (in
the sense of general recognition that a name or acronym "belongs" to
some recognized entity). The failure scenario is that the shared names
user community starts using a URI, say http://sharedname.org/acme/123.
Years later, the owner of the Acme name overhauls its namespace;
record 123 is now called record 112233. Shared Names responds by
setting up a server that translates the old record designators to the
new ones, and forwarding to the new Acme web site. Acme then claims
that Shared Names has no right to refer to record 112233 under the old
(stable) name acme/123 since it ought to be Acme that decides what its
own record numbers mean. The user community is now in a pickle.

As in the DOI case, use of numeric id-space designators protects
against this kind of trouble.
</snip>

Best
Jonathan

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