While I don't want to quibble with a line of thinking with which, on the whole, I entirely agree, I would point out that resolving systems haven't uniformly failed, historically. The Domain Name System works. (Imperfectly, yes, very imperfectly, and it does not support functionality we might, in a different world, desire it to, such as the recordation of provenance. But it does, on the whole, work.) In fact, we intend to rely on it to some extent if we intend to do Linked Data with "usual" URLs (as opposed to URLs with IP addresses in them).

Perhaps the meaning here was that _centralized_ resolving systems (which offer a single point of failure, e.g. purl.org) have generally failed (and often at that single point)?

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A. Soroka
The University of Virginia Library

On Jul 19, 2014, at 1:43 PM, "[log in to unmask]" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> I do not think that resolving systems can be a solution for something reliable. They failed from a historical view (there are reasons why e.g. Google never was in the need of an URN resolver).