Re: [urn] Formal request for URN for ITU

[Scott Mansfield <[e-mail]>]

This is what the doi factsheet says...

"DOI is not registered as a URN namespace, despite fulfilling all the functional requirements, since URN registration appears to offer no advantage to the DOI System."

So any examples they provide of the form urn:doi are not officially sanctioned, and could cause a conflict if anyone actually convinced IANA to register doi as a namespace.  What the ITU or DOI do with their parses/resolution services is not something that is being considered by the ITU's request for an 'itu' namespace. However, if/when 'itu' becomes a namespace, then urn:itu:doi would become something that could be used, but based on what I'm reading in the DOI literature, there seems little reason for the ITU to pursue that.  What the ITU does need is a valid Namespace that can be used for their YANG documents (since a namespace is needed for module identification).

Regards,
-scott.

-----Original Message-----
From: Dale R. Worley <[e-mail]> 
Sent: Wednesday, July 04, 2018 2:27 PM
To: Hakala, Juha E <[e-mail]>
Cc: Scott Mansfield <[e-mail]>; [e-mail]
Subject: Re: [urn] Formal request for URN for ITU

"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