Hi Luc,
Thanks for your reply! Your questions help a lot in brainstorming this. I guess the other part of the puzzle is IPFS itself. The ipfs.io/ipfs bridge is just a way to bridge today’s centralized internet stack to IPFS. Think about it as a permanent peer-to-peer network where as long as you are connected with some node that has the data (which could be a researcher over in the next university that also downloaded the same dataset) you can always retrieve it.
The original video from Juan Benet probably says it best (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUVmypx9HGI) - the newer ones are very flashy, but you can also look at hands-on overview like this: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/ipfs-101-understand-by-doing-it-9f5622c4d4ed/.
Of course, the big question is, will IPFS actually get enough traction, because its user community is growing but still small compared to the current web. On the other hand, you really only need a handful of data producers and users, the network auto-scales… and as a bonus it really would work nicely on Mars too.
Your other point about metadata handling is a good one. I think it’s not difficult to add metadata because IPLD supports links between blocks. You can see that in how qri.io uses IPFS (e.g. https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmTKhugTGYXe9ozosHSdeSDCfjr3fi5DDCzmeqM9czfExE). Like data standards, metadata standards will evolve over time, but if you would use something like JSON-LD, then you would have a decentralized linked web of data. If someone already defined an entity that you want to reuse, you can just copy the JSON-LD and as a bonus you would be storing an additional copy of that block.
However, you wouldn’t be able to version the metadata, because this whole idea hinges on the immutability of the content. As soon as you introduce versioning, you will have to have some sort of registry. This could still be a decentralized one, such as IPNS (https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/ipns/, see https://dweb-primer.ipfs.io/publishing-changes) or the ENS (https://ens.domains/), but that’s not the idea I have in the title.
Thanks for the link to SWHIDs, I see a number of parallels there with IPFS and IPLD indeed!
Greetings,
Kees