[hdf-forum] provenance

[Matthew Dougherty]

few ideas:

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

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.

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.

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




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