Re: [urn] call for comments: an alternative 2141bis document

[Larry Masinter <[e-mail]>]

I'm not sure how useful it is to "capture the answer to the question:  will this identifier ever by reassigned in the  normal course of business?"

I think the question was "why bother with the extra four 'urn:' letters, rather than just invent a new scheme?" and it's as useful to say that about  blah:stuff as it is about  urn:blah:stuff, and if you are handed a URL of the form "urn:blah:stuff" where you know nothing about "blah", you have no more information than you would have given "blah:stuff".

(blah = uuid & stuff cryptographically securely randomly generated or not).

I think you will have trouble defining "reassigned" and "normal course of business"... 

During the normal course of business http://host/path  always means  
   >>> talk to the host named "host", using whatever protocol is currently meant by "http", asking for "/path" <<<<

You probably mean something else by "reassigned", but there's a devil in the details of what it means in operational terms that make sense.

The theory I'm working on links persistence to meaning, in that, within a communication from Alice, through a repository R, to Bob,
that includes a URL/URI/URN/IRI

A --- U ---> R 
R --- U -->  B

Where the two transactions are time-offset, that the intention of meaning by A for U is tied directly to the expected persistent behavior of B when interpreting U. 



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ted Hardie [mailto:[e-mail]]
> Sent: Monday, November 19, 2012 8:39 AM
> To: Larry Masinter
> Cc: Renato Iannella; [e-mail]
> Subject: Re: [urn] call for comments: an alternative 2141bis document
> 
> On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 1:58 AM, Larry Masinter <[e-mail]>
> wrote:
> >> Hi Larry....as we all know, it is impossible to say that _anything_ will be
> >> persistent (even beyond our lifetimes) in this industry.
> 
> While I agree that there is no way to say that anything aiming to be
> persistent will succeed, I do think it is useful to capture the answer
> to the question:  will this identifier ever by reassigned in the
> normal course of business?  There are lots of reasons why you can be
> wrong in the answer you give, but the answer is useful.
> 
> This is also, oddly enough, why I think UUID URNs are just fine, even
> though they do not have an organizational guarantee--the cryptographic
> guarantee they provide is at least as good as the typical
> human-managed system.  So I can look at one in a system and understand
> that it is meant to be unique.
> 
> Just my personal view, of course,
> 
> Ted