[urn] Of RFC3187bis, RFC3188bis and namespace registrations in general
Juha Hakala <juha.hakala@helsinki.fi> Thu, 13 October 2011 11:22 UTC
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Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2011 14:22:18 +0300
From: Juha Hakala <juha.hakala@helsinki.fi>
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Subject: [urn] Of RFC3187bis, RFC3188bis and namespace registrations in general
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Hello, I have written updated versions of * draft-ietf-urnbis-rfc3187bis-isbn-urn * draft-ietf-urnbis-rfc3188bis-nbn-urn Some editorial help will be needed to publish them as Internet drafts; what I have now is two XML texts that need to be polished/converted to I-Ds. But I can send them either to the list (if that is OK) or anybody who is interested to review them. Since these texts rely on unpublished new version of rfc2141bis that myself and Alfred Hoenes have been working on, I'd rather wait until the next version of rfc2141bis has been made available before publishing them as I-Ds. But the WG is, like Peter pointed out in his message a week ago, behind schedule. And as the fact that we have been working on new versions of the I-Ds has not been made clear in the messages sent to the list, it is easy to get an impression that nothing much is happening in this particular WG. So if need be I am prepared to make some shortcuts here. Some comments concerning these namespace registrations and namespace registration process in general. I have taken into account the discussions on the list, especially as regards <fragment>. For ISBN this was trivial, since ISBN standard does not allow <fragment> usage. For NBN this was more complicated; there are three different ways in which fragments can be dealt with within that namespace. And this serves as an introduction to the first generic point, which is that the difficulty of writing a (decent) namespace registration has an inverse relation to the level of establishment the namespace has. ISBN is based on an international standard and it has been in production almost 40 years. It is easy to write a namespace registration to it, provided that the standard is not heavily modified and assignment practices do not change. No such changes are imminent in the case of ISBN. It is more difficult to supply an accurate NBN namespace registration. We have fairly good idea of who uses URN:NBN and for what purposes, but still the scope is not self evident. Unlike the previous versions, the I-D I completed today explicitly allows NBN assignment to works (things that only exist in Plato's world of ideas, such as "Hamlet"). These URN:NBNs will be resolved to work level metadata, which should include links to manifestations of the work. ISBNs can not be assigned to works; there is another identifier (ISTC) for that purpose. If you dislike the extension of the URN coverage to works, please discuss this topic on the list. For me, works may play a central role in the URN resolution since they are persistent (they are abstract entities that never change) whereas manifestations of digital resources are technology dependent and will not live long. But work level metadata is the bedrock to which we will be able to link all manifestations (and related works such as translations) related to a single work. I can't recall if the scope of the URN system as a whole has ever been formally specified. This issue is a bit complicated since the scope of the URN is the sum of all scopes of the identifiers that have a URN namespace. It only takes one very large namespace such as UUID to cover almost everything. But it might still be useful to discuss this topic, in order to see if there is a consensus among the list subscribers. Going back to NBN after this diversion, lots of things that are dictated by the base standard in the ISBN namespace, had to be written into the NBN namespace registration in order to make sure the users have an accurate enough idea of how to utilize URN:NBNs. There are also namespaces where there seems to be very little control, that is, basically anyone can use them to identify anything at any time. At least for a librarian like myself identifier assignment should not be organised like this. UUID has been mentioned before as an example of namespace which may require (local) control mechanisms beyond the namespace registration to function well. These URNs may fulfill the basic syntactic requirement of being globally unique, but beyond that these namespaces cannot guarantee much, although there may be islands of reliable resolution within them. As far as I am concerned, when a namespace registration is based on an international identifier standard such as ISBN, the RFC can / should be put on standard track. I am less certain what to do with NBN-like semi-established namespace registrations. At least IETF should take a good look at the communities behind them. I am not sure (without checking e.g. how URN:UUIDs work in practice) if UUID-like namespaces are really useful. I doubt if the identified resources themselves, or anything meaningful their URNs might resolve to, will be in existence for long (from the national library point of view, meaning several decades or even centuries). In the worst case there may eventually be many low-quality namespaces where most URNs will not live much longer than URLs or cool URIs. Such namespaces might eventually undermine the value of the URN system as a whole. I suppose that all this boils down to the question of control. Up to now IETF has operated on the basis of trust; as namespace registrations are informal RFCs they have not been (I suppose) scrutinized. Whether the level of control needs to be heightened is hard to say without making some kind of empirical check. Best regards, Juha -- Juha Hakala Senior advisor, standardisation and IT The National Library of Finland P.O.Box 15 (Unioninkatu 36, room 503), FIN-00014 Helsinki University Email juha.hakala@helsinki.fi, tel +358 50 382 7678
- [urn] Of RFC3187bis, RFC3188bis and namespace reg… Juha Hakala
- Re: [urn] Of RFC3187bis, RFC3188bis and namespace… Peter Saint-Andre
- Re: [urn] Of RFC3187bis, RFC3188bis and namespace… SM
- Re: [urn] Of RFC3187bis, RFC3188bis and namespace… Peter Saint-Andre
- Re: [urn] Of RFC3187bis, RFC3188bis and namespace… Juha Hakala
- Re: [urn] Of RFC3187bis, RFC3188bis and namespace… Andy Newton
- Re: [urn] Of RFC3187bis, RFC3188bis and namespace… Peter Saint-Andre
- Re: [urn] Of RFC3187bis, RFC3188bis and namespace… SM
- Re: [urn] Of RFC3187bis, RFC3188bis and namespace… Juha Hakala