radiantearth / source-cooperative

Source Cooperative
https://beta.source.coop
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[Proposed Feature] Object-level metadata #10

Open jedsundwall opened 1 year ago

jedsundwall commented 1 year ago

Description of Feature:

I would like to be able to look up Source-specific provenance metadata about any object in Source.

E.g. Imagine an object at https://data.source.coop/foo/bar/data.json

I would like to be able to construct a URL like https://data.source.coop/foo/bar/data.json/info.html or https://data.source.coop/foo/bar/data.json/info.json that tells me when this data was written to Source, the SHA-256 checksum for the object, and some information about who uploaded the file.

What value is this feature adding to Source Cooperative?

If Source is seen as a trustworthy arbiter of data, it will be useful to provide information about data provenance that other users can use to ascertain authenticity of certain objects. I'm open to being convinced that this provenance metadata should be written as a log entry to a blockchain, but my guess is that doing so wouldn't give us any real benefit in terms of verifiability or security.