Hi Adam,

More the second than the first.

For the record, I do not think it dangerous or crazy for you or anyone 
to publish assertions using VIAF URIs as their subject, but I do believe 
there are potentially some serious implications when one does such a 
thing.  Anyone can literally say anything about anything so, regardless, 
it is a real issue that exists today and must be managed versus outlawed or 
otherwise made impossible.  It has generally been managed to date by 
people choosing /not/ to make assertions using other's URIs as subjects.

If people or organizations mint their own URI and make assertions using 
that URI as the subject, then, yes, it helps with managing provenance 
and a number of other long-term issues.

There's been lots of talk about provenance and the like in a global 
graph of data, but I feel most of those discussions rely on fairly 
technical mechanisms, the complexity of which outweigh the simplicity of 
minting one's own URI.  (Also, the provenance statements will need their own 
URIs!)

Yours,
Kevin


On 07/10/2014 12:43 PM, [log in to unmask] wrote:
> Kevin--
>
> Are you arguing in what I quote below:
>
> 1) That it is dangerous or "crazy" for me to publish assertions using VIAF URIs as their subject, period?
>
> or
>
> 2) That it is better for me to mint URIs of my own because it helps us manage provenance, or helps me maintain my data over the long term, or for some other reason(s)? (While I also maintain authority/co-reference information that will be required by anyone who wants to interpret my assertions, e.g. "ex:abcd bf:hasAuthority viaf:abcd .")
>
> Or something else entirely that I'm not getting?
>
> ---
> A. Soroka
> The University of Virginia Library
>
> On Jul 10, 2014, at 12:25 PM, "Ford, Kevin" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> For example, with a bf:Authority approach, one could do this:
>>
>> ex:1234   bf:creator  ex:abcd
>>
>> ex:abcd   rdf:type bf:Person
>> ex:abcd   bf:note  "This person came here once in 1965.  It was cool."
>> ex:abcd   bf:hasAuthority viaf:abcd
>>
>> If a VIAF URI were used, this might happen:
>>
>> ex:1234   bf:creator  viaf:abcd
>> viaf:abcd  bf:note  "This person came here once in 1965.  It was cool."
>>
>> Are there mechanisms we could put in place to hopefully inhibit this?  Probably, but crazy data finds its way everywhere and it's probably impossible to stop this from happening.