XRI vote Aftermath

Henry Thompson was kind enough to provide his early response to my prior
questions, and also mentioned that the TAG is working on a more detailed
exposition of its position on this matter. Thanks Henry for your early
response, and I look forward to the TAG's more detailed exposition.

Of course Henry's response raised some more questions, and rather than
burden Henry alone I thought I'd ask the TAG. 

Henry thinks that XRIs don't meet a guideline documented in IETF's
RFC4395:

  "[T]he unbounded registration of new schemes is harmful.  New URI
   schemes SHOULD have clear utility to the broad Internet community,
   beyond that available with already registered URI schemes."

In the coming weeks I hope to document some use cases that demonstrate
clear utility for XRI beyond that available with already registered URI
schemes. I'll share them when they're ready. But in this message I'm
still just seeking clarification.

While RFC4395 suggests that new URI schemes SHOULD have clear utility to
the broad Internet community, RFC3986 suggests that a resource named by
a URI need not have any relevance to the Internet community at all:

	"A resource is not necessarily accessible via the Internet;
e.g., human beings, corporations, and bound books in a library can also
be resources.  Likewise, abstract concepts can be resources, such as the
operators and operands of a mathematical equation, the types of a
relationship (e.g., "parent" or "employee"), or numeric values (e.g.,
zero, one, and infinity)."

So here's my question. Even if the broader Internet community doesn't
recognize value in a proposed new URI scheme, wouldn't utility to other
communities warrant consideration of a new scheme? 

Marty.Schleiff@boeing.com; CISSP
Associate Technical Fellow - Cyber Identity Specialist
Information Security - Technical Controls
(206) 679-5933

Received on Friday, 6 June 2008 05:14:10 UTC