URIs as IDs in ModSAX (was Re: ModSAX (SAX 1.1) Proposal) (fw d)

Ron Daniel RDaniel at DATAFUSION.net
Thu Feb 18 16:59:12 GMT 1999


David is mostly correct when he says that there are no standards
for making URNs from ISBNs, UUIDs, etc. However, there is actually
some pretty good indication of what those standards will look like.

ISBNS (and a couple of other bibliographic identifiers) as URNs are
described in the RFC 2288, "Using Existing Bibliographic
Identifiers as Uniform Resource Names"
http://info.internet.isi.edu:80/in-notes/rfc/files/rfc2288.txt
Caveats: that is an informational RFC, not a standards-track one,
although there is a desire to standardize the URN encoding of such
identifiers. The question surrounding the ISBNs is whether the namespace
should be 'isbn' or if ISO might want to use something else. (Truth in
advertising disclosure - I'm a co-author of that document).

Of more interest to the discussion in this group is the prospect of
using UUIDs (or GUIDs) as identifiers. (UUIDs and GUIDs are described
in the now-expired Internet-draft
http://search.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-leach-uuids-guids-01.txt
)
A uuid: URI scheme is proposed in another expired draft:
http://search.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-kindel-uuid-uri-00.txt
Although I can't turn it up right now, I've seen a fair number of
   urn:guid:ugly-guid-string-here
style identifiers. Those seem unlikely to change.

The real bottleneck in URN schemes is in the registry for URN
namespaces.
I've not been keeping up with that, but the last time I checked they
were
specifying the info that had to be provided when registering a
namespace.
The assumption was that IANA would run the registry similar to the
media types registry.


Regards,
Ron Daniel


> -----Original Message-----
> From:	David Megginson [SMTP:david at megginson.com]
> Sent:	Wednesday, February 17, 1999 1:44 PM
> To:	XML Dev
> Subject:	Re: URIs as IDs in ModSAX (was Re: ModSAX (SAX 1.1)
> Proposal) (fwd)
> 
> John Cowan writes:
> 
>  > >   urn:inet:megginson.com:ns:foo
>  > > 
>  > > cannot (because there's no standard for what 'inet' means).
>  > 
>  > Cannot and should not be, because there's no assurance that
>  > someone not David may not have megginson.com in the future,
>  > and might make conflicting URN assignments.
>  > 
>  > Spam.org has had four owners that I know of.
> 
> But there's also no standard for building URNs on uuids, ISBNs, or
> anything else -- there's just no standard, period.
> 
> 
> All the best,
> 
> 
> David
> 
> -- 
> David Megginson                 david at megginson.com
>            http://www.megginson.com/
> 
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