RE: [URN] WG last call: URN Namespace Definition Mechanisms

["Larry Masinter" <[e-mail]>]

> >What was the source of the
> >requirement for reserving two-letter NIDs for country codes?
> 
> It was output from my discussions on namespaces held with the policy 
> oversight committee, when I was appointed by IAB there.
> 
> I.e. from some countries (not few), there are "questions" whether the 
> 2-letter countrycode according to ISO can be allocated within each gTLD. 
> This was later expanded to the URN namespaces for for example social 
> security numbers and other series of names which are unique within each 
> country -- like car license plates in some countries.
> 
> So, the input is from the gTLD debate, and the result solves some problems 
> on what to do with geopolitical bounded namespaces. I.e. each country have 
> to handle their namespaces the way they find it the easiest.

But is the URN space hierarchical? It would seem that at least according
to the proposed "URN Namespace Definition Mechanisms", that each namespace
is expected to have consistent set features for the namespace. Are you
imagining something like this?

urn:us:ca:license:3URN101    California license plates
urn:us:ssn:459-82-0101       social security numbers
urn:us:tax:100-25-0717       taxpayer ID

but each of these sub-namespaces have different 'communities'
uniqueness considerations, persistence considerations, etc.

The syntax in RFC 2141 suggests that a namespace is just first part.

I would imagine that given the use of "-" as a possible delimiter for
namespaces, that the syntax actually should be

urn:us-ca-license:3URN101
urn:us-ssn:459-82-0101
urn:us-tax:100-25-0717

if a namespace is expected to have consistent values for the
elements of the template in draft-ietf-urn-nid-req, or else
you're actually defining hierarchical namespaces, where "us:ca:license"
is a namespace designator.

Am I misunderstanding something about the intention of having a
registration form for namespaces?

Do you want to reserve all namespaces that start with two letters
and then a "-"?

Larry
-- 
http://www.parc.xerox.com/masinter