Subject: URN scheme for IANA registrations

From: Larry Masinter <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2000 09:51:41 -0800

I looked through the archives but didn't see this discussed
in the past, and would like opinions about creating a URN name
space for IANA registrations.

Some protocols (especially those within W3C) wish to use
URIs uniformly as the moral equivalent of OIDs in ISO protocols,
i.e., a way of having assigned parameter names & values
be notated and referenced.

In IETF protocols, there are some protocol elements that are,
instead, registered with IANA and then listed in one of the
categories in http://www.iana.org/numbers.html.

The general idea is to create a way to refer to these IANA
registrations using a URI. While it might be as reasonable
to use http://www.iana.org/<namespace>/<value> as a template
for such URIs, it might also be more stable to use
   URN:IANA:<namespace>:<value>
as the URI.

I suppose either mechanism would require a BCP which would instruct
IANA to maintain the registry in such a fashion to fit into
the syntactic rules of URLs/URNs (respectively).

For the most part, this is imposed by the file name restrictions
in ftp://www.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/ but the BCP and
namespace registration would formalize the conventions.

What do you think? Doing this would help resolve a number of
irritations in the URI-vs-registry debates, since it would
create a URI for registered values.

Larry

--
http://larry.masinter.net

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From: Leslie Daigle <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2000 19:44:05 -0500

Howdy,

>    URN:IANA:<namespace>:<value>

[...]

> create a URI for registered values.

Sounds like a fine idea, assuming IANA's comfortable with it.

I would imagine the BCP could/would be the namespace definition
(RFC2611)  -- i.e., not a lot more than what you've described, probably
following loosely on what Ryan Moats did for the proposed "IETF"
namespace for documents (RFC2648).

Are you volunteering?  :->

Leslie.

--

-------------------------------------------------------------------
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Leslie Daigle
[email-masked]
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From: "Martin J. Duerst" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2000 11:16:10 +0900

Hello Larry,

I think the direction you point out makes very much sense.
I have had some thoughts in this direction, which I will
add below.

>    URN:IANA:<namespace>:<value>

URN:IANA:<namespace>:<value> MAY be more stable.
http://www.iana.org/<namespace>/<value> would have some
important operational benefits, mainly to force IANA to
keep their site clean and to be able to find the relevant
data quickly on deployed infrastructure.

> the syntactic rules of URLs/URNs (respectively).

Yes. And in both cases, it would involve quite some work,
both for checking through all the registrations and deciding
how to best allocate/identify them, and then for IANA to
clean up things.

Although this does by way not apply to all registrations,
there are quite a few of them where the content of the registration
can be expressed in a machine-readable form.

> create a URI for registered values.

Definitely an idea worth working on.

Regards,   Martin.

#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, I18N Activity Lead, World Wide Web Consortium
#-#-#  mailto:[email-masked]   http://www.w3.org/People/D%C3%BCrst

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From: Terry Allen <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2000 19:16:36 -0800

Larry wrote:
| The general idea is to create a way to refer to these IANA
| registrations using a URI. While it might be as reasonable
| to use http://www.iana.org/<namespace>/<value> as a template
| for such URIs, it might also be more stable to use
|    URN:IANA:<namespace>:<value>
| as the URI.

The meaning of the word "namespace" has been confused by its
use for the syntactic device yclept "XML Namespaces"; could
you explain what it means here?  Is it a sort of sub-NID?

regards, Terry

Terry Allen
Document Engineering Group
Commerce One, Inc.
Mountain View, Calif.
tallen[at]sonic.net

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From: Michael Mealling <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2000 22:32:01 -0500

> you explain what it means here?  Is it a sort of sub-NID?

We use the term namespace as more of a general term.
In this particular example any identifiable chunk of the URN
defines some set of names which we call a namespace.
namespace = a defined set of names

-MM

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From: "Martin J. Duerst" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2000 14:55:32 +0900

> can be expressed in a machine-readable form.

Sorry, wasn't quite finished.

If such a representation is available, this is what the URI
should point to. That way, it is possible both to use the URI
as a pure identifier (your app already knows what's registered)
as well as to get apps updated on new registrations.

Regards,   Martin.