Subject: new URN namespace

From: José Luis Borbinha <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 23:34:19 +0100

Dear URN / URI list members,
I'd appreciate very much your comments and advise for the purpose of this
attachment.
This is already a "draft of a draft", so please excuse me for some possible
naive errors already on it...

Many thanks in advance!
Regards,
José Borbinha

PS: I did A LOT of plagiarism from RFC 2648 - "A URN Namespace for IETF
Documents"..., for which I didn't get the permission from its author, Ryan
Moats. I've been trying to contact him, but it looks that his email has
problems. I've been receiving from his mail server:
"550 <[email-masked]>... User unknown ????"
Any help with Ryan's contact will be also welcome...

_______________________________________
José Luis Borbinha <[email-masked]>
Biblioteca Nacional (National Library of Portugal)
Direcção de Serviços de Inovação e Desenvolvimento
(Direction of Services for Innovation and Development)
Campo Grande, 83 - 1749-081 Lisboa - PORTUGAL
Tel./Fax: (+351) 217 982 083 / 217 982 123

---

From: Michael Mealling <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 08:21:02 -0400

On Tue, Aug 22, 2000 at 11:34:19PM +0100, José Luis Borbinha wrote:
> attachment.  This is already a "draft of a draft", so please excuse me
> for some possible naive errors already on it...

Hehe... so far you're one of the best documents I've seen! ;-)

> Any help with Ryan's contact will be also welcome...

So did I and I suspect most are using that as a rough template. Ryan
is now at a startup that I can't remember right now but I'm sure that
if you simply put something to that effect in the acknowledgements section
of the document that it will be sufficient. We all rather blatantly steal
from each others documents.

I haven't had a chance to read the thing entirely through but I have to ask:
Since you grandfather ISSNs and such underneath your space, would you be
happier with those in their own URN space instead of under yours or is
there a particular reason you want to do this? I'm asking because I
always assumed, possibly incorrectly, that we might end up with ISBNs
and their ilk in their own ISBN namespace (i.e. urn:isbn:foo-bar or
urn:issn:foo-bar).

-MM

--
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Mealling        |      Vote Libertarian!       | www.rwhois.net/michael
Sr. Research Engineer   |   www.ga.lp.org/gwinnett     | ICQ#:         14198821
Network Solutions       |          www.lp.org          |  [email-masked]

---

From: José Luis Borbinha <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 15:17:28 +0100

----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Mealling" <[email-masked]>
>and their ilk in their own ISBN namespace (i.e. urn:isbn:foo-bar or

I was expecting that :-)

Please note that we define "resource" in a frist step as a "bibliographic
description".
When you ask to our namespace to resolve a "urn:pt-bn:isbn:foo-bar", what it
is supposed to be returned is a URL for an HTML page (in this moment, it is
an HTML page...). This page presents:
- a bibliographic description of the book (in this case, we are talking
about books...), as it is in our national bibliographic database (PORBASE)
- and possibly links.

The links in the page/resource can be of several classes:
- links to all the libraries that we know have the book in their shelves (we
have that information registered now in a central database, where the
updates are done at an irrgular basis, but we are moving to a new
distributed system, which will make it possible for some libraries to link
directly to their partons' system...).
- links to on-line repositories, if the "book" is available in any digital
format, and we know it. The access control, if required, will be an issue to
be managed by the repository...
- (I have in mind other classes of links, but I need to think a bit more
about that...)

Regards,
jose borbinha

PS: I have already the contact of Ryan Moats...

---

From: Michael Mealling <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 10:09:23 -0400

> - (I have in mind other classes of links, but I need to think a bit more

Gotcha. So you are using the ISSN number to name something in your
database, not actually assign or claim authority over an ISSN that
may have been assigned in Portugal.

The second part of the question still stands: would it make your life
easier to have an ISSN namespace to point to or does it really not matter
for your application?

-MM

---

From: José Luis Borbinha <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 15:46:35 +0100

>may have been assigned in Portugal.

Yes! The assignment of ISSNs in Portugal is a responsability of a
publisher's private institution... I am only reusing the identifier...
Please note that trying to resolve a URN "urn:pt-bn:isbn:foo-bar" for a book
that does not exist in any library member of the national catalogue, it
gives you nothing...

>easier to have an ISSN namespace to point to or does it really not matter

It depends... What would give me back that namespace? If the ISSN authority
(like the ISSN...) decides to normalize a URN namespace, than that is
another link that I can put in my resource (my HTML page...).

BTW, the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) has a similar approach, since
associated to any DOI there is always a minimal metadata description... They
say also that the resolution of a DOI, by an Handle framework, will point in
the end to an HTML page (for now, of course...)

jlb
PS: I forgot to mention other important detail: we are expect the some
digital publications wil lbe deposited in the Nat. Lib. in more than one
format (for example, MS-Word and PDF and HTML....). We want to have only one
URN for these cases, so another reason because we want it to point to the
bibliographic description, from where these different formats (but all
related to the same "edition") are available...

---

From: José Luis Borbinha <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 16:02:24 +0100

OOPS. I did a mistake... In fact the ISSN is assigned by the National
Library (my eyes-based input had a lexical error, so my brain processed
"ISBN" when I read it...).
But all the arguments that I used are valid also for this case!
Regards,
jlb