Re: [urn] Formal request for URN for ITU

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

"Hakala, Juha E" <[e-mail]> writes:
> ITU is closely involved with the Handle system:
>
> http://www.itu.int/osg/csd/emerging_trends/handle_system/index.html
>
> Does "identifiers defined by ITU" cover also Handles and if so, what
> is their relation to URNs? In other words, are there ITU sectors which
> use Handles as SectorResourceSpecificStrings? If there are, it might
> be better to assign URN namespace to Handles as well. As far as I
> know, ITU is the one organization which can make such a request,
> having adopted CNRI's Handle responsibilities.

Wikipedia claims:

    Handles can be used natively. or expressed as Uniform Resource
    Identifiers (URIs) through a namespace within the info URI scheme;
    for example, 20.1000/100 may be written as the URI,
    info:hdl/20.1000/100. Some Handle System namespaces, such as Digital
    Object Identifiers, are "info:" URI namespaces in their own right;
    for example, info:doi/10.1000/182 is another way of writing the
    handle for the current revision of the DOI Handbook as a URI.

> [...] each DOI can be expressed as actionable
> URN just by adding urn:doi: in front of the DOI prefix (note that such
> NID has not been registered the DOI system or some other identifier
> yet). I assume it would not be too difficult to make Handles
> actionable URNs as well, in e.g. urn:handle: namespace.

That's interesting, in that DOIs have a defined format like
"doi:10.1000/182", which is official per the International DOI
Foundation but "doi" is NOT a registered URI scheme.

So these are equivalent, to the degree that they are defined:

    info:hdl/10.1000/182
    info:doi/10.1000/182
    doi:10.1000/182
    urn:doi:10.1000/182

Dale