[hdf-forum] provenance

[Quincey Koziol]

Hi Matthew,

On Mar 24, 2009, at 3:05 PM, Matthew Dougherty wrote:

> few ideas:
>
> 1) should be allowable to have more than one UUID.
> They may be independent of each other, and added at different times.

	Hmm, what do you mean here?  Below you were asking for a single  
unique ID for each HDF5 file...

> 2) UUID conforms to Open Software Foundation standards, which is good.
> looking at the website mentioned:   Version 1 scheme has been  
> criticized in that it is not sufficiently 'opaque'; it reveals both  
> the identity of the computer that generated the UUID and the time at  
> which it did so.
>
> 3) Not sure I agree with the desirability implied by the objection  
> noted.  Having it non-opaque  would be desirable for provenance.
> I think version 4 UUID in addition to the creation date, mac/ 
> computer name, & user account.

	We could allow an application to choose which type of UUID to store.   
I've filed a bug for adding a UUID to a file and will amend it to  
suggest giving the application the choice of which version of the UUID  
to store.

> 4) have a non changeable flag set in the HDF creation that would  
> override calls to  H5Pset_obj_track_times ignoring 'track_times'  
> parameter set to FALSE.
> set it at creation and modifications & changes are always noted.

	Hmm, I don't think that's very helpful, really.  We don't have any  
other "override" properties like this...

> 5) A dataset, accessed only by internal HDF infrastructure (that is  
> not directly writeable using HDF apis) that centrally logs all the  
> changes.

	This is a _lot_ more intensive to implement, I don't think we can go  
in this direction without some real funding for the effort.  :-)

	Quincey


> On Mar 24, 2009, at 2:21 PM, Quincey Koziol wrote:
>
>>> Is there a unique identifier internally within an HDF file when it  
>>> is created?
>>>
>>> Something that would distinguish it from another HDF file created  
>>> two seconds later, and cannot be disabled or modified.
>>> Do not want to use the operating system/file system creation date  
>>> or parameters in fstat, prefer a HDF api.
>>
>> 	That's a good idea...  Would a UUID fit what you are thinking?  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uuid 
>> )
>>
>> 		Quincey
>
>

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