Repository identifiers are externally meaningful

A. Soroka asks: "

Ben-- under externalizable IDs, would you buy this:

Fedora should be able to produce and manage externally-meaningful IDs, without respect to its internal workings...

?"

Can you re-frame this so that it's clearer what the use case is?

I wonder if Fedora is the right place to mint externally meaningfull (i.e. globally unique?) identifiers. I think it would be a far better idea to create a independant service that is able to mint all kinds of identifiers. In a default configuration, it might produce the legacy Fedora "PID", but it might interface with a Handle/DOI/ARC/URN/PURL service to mint globally unique persistent identifiers.

A use case would be improving the capabilities for participating in the world of linked open data. Another one could be (even though related) creating a graph that spans several Fedora instances
see use cases

• Repository is a continuous graph
• Modeling content in concert with the wider world
• Using the resources of the Semantic Web to describe repository contents
• Repository subsystems can scale horizontally

Matthias- I have advocated this very approach in previous "FCRepo 4.x" discussions.  I agree that it would support those use cases; it would also make scale out for ingest more feasible.