Re: URNs for personal documents?

> I'd like to assign URNs to some of my personal documents, for easy cross
> referencing and for learning about the URN system.
> 
> Some questions:
> 
> * Is there are Namespace Identifier to be used for that purpose (e.g.
>   "personal_document")?
> 
> * How do I make sure that the Namespace Specific Strings are unique?  By
>   choosing random personalized strings similar to Message IDs in emails?
> 
> * What database should I use to map URNs to actual document locations on
>   my hard disk?
> 
> * Is there some recommended way to tag a text document with a URN? (I
>   guess not)
> 
> Note that, of course, I could just go ahead, add tags to my documents
> whose structure I made up, use a simple text based database to map
> these tags to documents, and write a little script that tells me the
> location of a file given a tag.  However, I'd like to know how to do it
> the "URN way".

I suggest: 
    
   1. Imagine that some day you'll want these documents to be
      available on the web.   What address would be good for 
      them if they were?  Maybe something like 
      http://felix-klee.org/2006/03/doc42 ?

      Invest in the domain name.

      Then use that kind of URL as the tag, knowing that it's likely
      to be still useful long after your current hard-drive is gone,
      and you'll have moved some of the documents to your web server.

   2. If you can't bring yourself to do that, use tag URIs.  See
      taguri.org.

Just my not-so-humble opinion.  :-)
 
     -- Sandro

Received on Wednesday, 22 March 2006 18:18:29 UTC