[urn] Re: [Uri-review] Re: Re: [EXTERNAL] Re: Request to register the glue URI scheme

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I'm not a URI reviewer but I ran into a half-baked idea that is somewhat
aligned with the concept of GLUE.  Let me propose it to get some
feedback.

What is needed is a way to record inexact, non-authoritative, indicative
identifiers.  These identifiers, being inexact, generally aren't used
for routine data processing, but rather in exceptional situations where
a human wants to investigate the supply chain of a group of things.

There's a requirement that the URI can be put into a data field that
"expects a URI", so it has to not be confusable with defined identifier
schemes.

It seems to me that this can be solved by the "data" URI scheme, which
is designed to carry arbitrary (short) strings.  In its simplest usage,
we can carry the identifier "ship 27" by

    data:,ship%2027

(The comma is mandatory.)

Various extensions can handle non-ASCII character sets.  And as you can
see, if there was a URN available for the data field, it can be used
unambiguously instead of the data: URI.

I can easily envision that informal conventions would arise, such as
starting the string with a prefix like "foobar:" to indicate that the
remainder of the string was a "foobar" identifier.

In use, currently these identifiers would be read and interpreted by a
human, within the context of much more information about the product
that it is associated with.  But I can envision that in the future, an
AI system could do a decent job of doing such interpretation.

Dale