use of URNs in web services....

Hi everyone,
  In looking at various tools and documents about 'web services' around
the net I've seen a dangerous trend: in many cases people are using
URNs without registering the namespaces. The use and syntax is generally 
correct (with some notable exceptions) but there seems to be some confusion
about the registration process. The intent of the 'urn:' scheme is 
to be a managed namespace so that there is a process and policy which allows 
systems to assume things about the longgevity of the identifier. 

  The W3C URI Interest Group came out with several recommendations
in its report [1], one of which was that Working Groups should be requiring
registration of their URI schemes and URN namespaces. I know this may seem
to be a minor issue but the URI infrastructure is one of the key components
of the web and if its not rigorously protected the interoperability we
hope to accomplish will suffer....

  The documents to reference are RFC 2141 [2] and RFC 2611 [3] and the
current list of registered URN namespaces [4]. (Note: RFC 2611 is being
updated but the RFC hasn't been published yet so eventually RFC 2611 will
be obsoleted [5]. )

  If you have any questions about the process or if you need help filling
out the template please don't hesitate to contact me.

Thanks!

-MM

[1] http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-mealling-uri-ig-02.txt
[2] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2141.txt
[3] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2611.txt
[4] http://www.iana.org/assignments/urn-namespaces
[5] http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-urn-rfc2611bis-04.txt

-- 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Mealling	|      Vote Libertarian!       | urn:pin:1
michael@neonym.net      |                              | http://www.neonym.net

Received on Wednesday, 3 April 2002 12:18:56 UTC