Re: [urn] CTS and CITE2 URNs

[Martin J. Dürst <[e-mail]>]

Hello Peter, others,

Sorry to reply to an older email.

On 2019/03/07 13:02, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
> On 3/4/19 11:58 PM, Hakala, Juha E wrote:
> 
>> I am in favour of registering these namespaces. The only reservation I have is the usage of "@" to separate subreferences. Would it be possible to use hash character for this purpose?
>>
>> At https://cite-architecture.github.io/ohco2/quick/
>>
>> the researchers themselves give the following example:
>>
>> urn:cts:greekLit:tlg5026.msA.hmt:1.2.lemma#μῆνις

> A follow-on observation. As the genesis of the CTS and CITE2 namespaces
> within the Homer Multitext project indicates, it might be desirable for
> literal strings in the NSS to include characters outside the ASCII range
> (e.g., `μῆνις`). I suspect that such strings would be limited to the
> PASSAGE and SUBREFERENCE constructs, but perhaps the registrants could
> clarify that for us. In any case, here it seems that "the nature of the
> particular URN namespace makes such characters necessary" (RFC 8141, §2.2).
> 
> However, the same section of RFC 8141 also clearly states:
> 
>     In particular, with regard to characters outside the ASCII range,
>     URNs that appear in protocols or that are passed between systems MUST
>     use only Unicode characters encoded in UTF-8 and further encoded as
>     required by RFC 3986.
> 
> As far as I can see, this implies that the foregoing PASSAGE value needs
> to be encoded as follows:
> 
> `1.2.lemma#%CE%BC%E1%BF%86%CE%BD%CE%B9%CF%82`
> 
> Unfortunately, that's not as user-friendly for people who know the
> language of the source text from which the literal string is taken.
> 
> (Yes, the URNBIS Working Group had lengthy discussions about whether to
> allow non-percent-encoded Unicode characters outside the ASCII range in
> the URN syntax, and ultimately decided against it.)

Well, all URNs are URIs (RFC 3986), and for URIs, there's IRIs (RFC 
3987), so urn:cts:greekLit:tlg5026.msA.hmt:1.2.lemma#μῆνις would work in 
any protocol slot that accepted IRIs, and would automatically be 
converted to the ugly 
urn:cts:greekLit:tlg5026.msA.hmt:1.2.lemma#%CE%BC%E1%BF%86%CE%BD%CE%B9%CF%82 
whenever necessary.

Regards,   Martin.