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An LCCN is useful because I can use it to look up records in _multiple_ different databases. I suppose that you will argue this is a form of "de-referencing", but it is not a canonical de-referencing, because I want and need to do it in multiple places. It is also not a de-referencing that can be _automatically_ done from the semantic information in the identifier alone (no matter how it's formatted, as an info: uri, as a http:uri, or as some kind of an identifier that isn't a URI at all). And is useful despite this, it does not require automatically discoverable de-referencing, and since I need to look it up in multiple databases, and the particular databases are determined by my own local business logic, there's probably no way to make an LCCN identifier that is 'automatically' de-referenceable for my needs. LCCN is also a useful identifier because it allows me to recognize when two records in the same database represent the same title.Or, for LCCN's an authority records, when two titles in my database are written by the same entity. That doesn't necessarily involve de-referencing at all. So maybe that's an even better story. That's one example, LCCN. There are others, used in similar ways. Jonathan Ed Summers wrote: > On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 12:20 PM, Jonathan Rochkind <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > >> I completely disagree. There are all sorts of useful identifiers I use in >> my work every day that can not be automatically dereferenced. >> > > How are they useful to you? I'm seriously just asking for examples > here, not trying to start an argument. > > //Ed > >