[SPG_Active_Members] Re: Robert Kahn

[Henry Gladney]

Ref: Your attached inquiry

Kahn (with whom I had personal interactions about seven years ago) is one of
the original designers of the communication protocols essential to the
Internet.   He is the head of CNRI, which used to derive (and perhaps still
derives) all of its funding from DoD's DARPA.  I.e., he is both very well
connnected and also pretty much constrained to follow "the party line" in
his public statements.  I.e., they cannot reasonably be regarded as
independent thinking.

>From a technical point of view, nothing in the text you sent is even close
to novel.  E.g., everything he is quoted as saying can be found, with
careful elaboration, in *Preserving Digital Information IPDI).  *The (almost
obvious) objectives of long-term preservation force the few technical hings
this press release includes. *  *And none of it was new in PDI, which merely
selected, distilled, and put into (hopefullly) readily understood terms what
was known about digital objects, their management, identifiers, and other
EDP concepts/designs mentioned or implied in this CNRI press release.

I do not know the work Kahn alludes to in his assertion, "that CNRI has
experimented with some archival capabilities on the Internet with the goal
of fulfilling long-term archival storage needs".  Nor does this press
release identifiy it sufficiently specifically for me (or anyone) to
identify with certainty reports about the CNRI work alluded to.  One could,
of course, ask Kahn for citations.

Best wishes, Henry

H.M. Gladney, Ph.D.     http://home.pacbell.net/hgladney/   (408)867-3933


On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 14:46, Morris and Ward <morris.ward at verizon.net>wrote:

>  HMG:
>
>
>
> What’s your take on this LDP news?  AM
>
> * *
>
> *Robert Kahn: A Different Kind of Internet*
> *Government Computer News (05/14/09) Kash, Wyatt*
>
> Robert E. Kahn of the nonprofit Corporation for National Research
> Initiatives (CNRI) envisions an Internet that manages information rather
> than just moves it around. He says this can be facilitated by Digital Object
> Architecture, whose core element is a digital objector, or structured
> information that incorporates a unique identifier, and which can be parsed
> by any machine aware of the structure of digital objects. Areas where
> Digital Object Architecture applications have potential include archiving,
> with Kahn pointing out that CNRI has experimented with some archival
> capabilities on the Internet with the goal of fulfilling long-term archival
> storage needs. "My hope is that we can make the digital object technology,
> which operated in the Internet environment, available as we did with the
> original Internet technology, and get a lot of people in the public and
> private sectors to understand its power and the capability," Kahn says.
> "Because it's an open architecture, it has the potential to grow organically
> as did the nascent Internet." Kahn sees medical informatics as another
> potential application area for Digital Object Architecture. He says the
> architecture intrinsically incorporates public key infrastructure to ensure
> user identity authentication. "The government's role in things
> infrastructural is absolutely essential," Kahn says. "It really is very
> difficult--I would say almost impossible--to create national infrastructure
> without at least the imprimatur of the government."
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: ../attachments/20090522/43b23ece/attachment.html