URI WG and the bibp: scheme

I am very interested in learning more about the new/resurrected 
W3C activities and plans in the URI area.   

I have been working for some time with the notion of open document
identifiers for reference linking and have developed a proposal
for a bibp: (bibliographic protocol) scheme.   

BibP (bibliographic protocol) links bibliographic identifiers of published
works to bibliographic services for those works. Identifiers follow the
Universal Serial Item Name (USIN) scheme, providing a
scholar-friendly conventional notation for journal articles, books and
institutional publications, as well as a generic framework that can
scale to identify documents in any organized collection. A hierarchical
resolution model emphasizes bibliographic services available through
local libraries backed up by publisher-specified and global services.
Resolution is achieved through existing DNS technology coupled with
appropriate client-side support.   This support may be embedded
in documents directly in the form of a short ECMAscript resolver.

The BibP/USIN approach applies the principles underlying the Uniform
Resource Name (URN) concept [RFC1737] to the particular problem of
bibliographic linking. Focussing on a library-based network in this
narrower domain, BibP defines a much simpler resolution model than
that required for URN support in general [RFC2276]. Based on existing
DNS support for relative domain names [RFC1034], the model requires
no new development or deployment of DNS technology. In addition, the
problems of namespace definition and management [RFC2611] are consid-
erably simplified by restriction to bibliographic identifiers of the
USIN system.
   
See http://usin.org/ for more details about the project and some
rudimentary demos.

An internet draft draft-cameron-tatu-bibp-02.txt describes 
the protocol and has been submitted to the IETF for RFC publication.   
It's available from the usual places or from the http://usin.org/ page.
I would very much appreciate constructive feedback from the URI WG 
with respect to this document.

Robert D. Cameron, Ph. D.
Associate Dean of Applied Sciences
Professor of Computing Science
8888 University Drive
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, B.C., Canada  V5A 1S6
http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~cameron/

Received on Wednesday, 10 January 2001 19:21:20 UTC