[urn] Moving ahead with draft-spinosa-urn-lex

[[e-mail] (Dale R. Worley)]

My apologies for not working on this earlier.

The current draft of "urn-lex" is draft-spinosa-urn-lex-12.  People have
criticized its proposed URN system in many ways, but it seems to me that
most of the criticisms are "bibliographic", they concern good ways to
create identifiers for written works.  As such, the IETF is not a good
forum for correcting most of those problems.

My proposal is that we implement "rough consensus and running code" --
obtain a usable registration of the "lex" URN namespace so that the
authors and ITTIG can put the "lex" URNs into practice.  The process of
using the URNs will educate the authors regarding the correct resolution
of the various problems, and will likely cause them to later submit a
revised registration.

That is, the registration we create at this time will be understood to
be experimental in nature.

In order to be suitable as an "experimental" registration, there are a
few problems that must be resolved:

1. The URN syntax must conform to the generic URN syntax.

2. The requirements of uniqueness and persistence must be met.  (That
is, any URN designates at most one resource, and the resource that it
designates must not change over time.  However, it is permissible to
have multiple URNs designate the same resource.)

3. The process or authority that assigns each URN must be well-defined.

Item 1 is taken care of, in that the syntax in -12 conforms (as far as I
can tell) to the URN syntax in RFC 8141.

Item 2 is the responsibility of the Jurisdictional Registrars, in the
same way that the naming authorities of many other URN namespaces are
responsible for uniqueness and persistence.

Item 3 requires that a registry of jurisdiction codes and Jurisdictional
Registrars be maintained.  Section 11.2 of the -12 draft proposes that
IANA maintain the registry.  Given the experimental nature of the URN
registration, it seems to me to be premature to involve IANA, especially
since the principles that the Designated Export must implement are
likely to change over time.  Instead, it seems to me that the best
choice for registrar is ITTIG-CNR, the proposer and developer of the URN
namespace.

When the namespace definition is transitioned to a non-experimental
status (including fixing a good set of policies to assign jurisdiction
codes), the registry can be transferred to IANA to implement the proven
policies.

Following this path requires only small changes for -13, viz., updating
section 11.2.

Dale
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Archived discussions:

https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/urn/current/msg03828.html
16 Nov 2017
"urn:lex draft v. 12"

https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/urn/current/msg03811.html
starting 20 Sep 2017
"Request for new URN namespace review: LEX"
Message-Id: <[e-mail]>

https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/urn-nid/current/msg01270.html
starting 29 Apr 2014
"Publication request for draft-spinosa-urn-lex"
Message-Id: <CALaySJJk5YiCQZqt6WoWkqfAzi2A04HEAH=[e-mail]>

https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/urn-nid/current/msg01204.html
starting 27 Mar 2013
"Application for a formal URN NID"
Message-Id: <23A64284-6B03-4B24-B680-54A61E96BECA at ittig.cnr.it>

https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/urn-nid/current/msg01059.html
15 Oct 2009
"URN LEX Namespace submission"