- From: Terry Allen <terry@ora.com>
- Date: Fri, 16 Jun 1995 07:38:06 -0700
- To: Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu>, "Terry Allen" <terry@ora.com>
- Cc: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>, roxanab@attmail.com, uri@bunyip.com
Keith:
>If we can't agree on at least one resolution method to be widely
used, there won't be any meaningful criteria with which to
choose a URN scheme.
Suppose there were only two resolution sites, and they used two
different methods. From RFC 1737 I extract:
o Global scope
o Global uniqueness
o Persistence
o Scalability
o Legacy support
o Extensibility
o Independence
o Resolution
o Single encoding
o Simple comparison
o Human transcribability
o Transport friendliness
o Machine consumption
o Text recognition
That document also says
o Resolution: A URN will not impede resolution (translation into a
URL, q.v.). To be more specific, for URNs that have corresponding
URLs, there must be some feasible mechanism to translate a URN to a
URL.
but so long as a URN is globally unique, any sort of lookup method
will serve. And I draw the attention of the group to:
o Legacy support: The scheme must permit the support of existing
legacy naming systems, insofar as they satisfy the other
requirements described here. For example, ISBN numbers, ISO
public identifiers, and UPC product codes seem to satisfy the
functional requirements, and allow an embedding that satisfies
the syntactic requirements described here.
Regards,
--
Terry Allen (terry@ora.com) O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
Editor, Digital Media Group 101 Morris St.
Sebastopol, Calif., 95472
A Davenport Group sponsor. For information on the Davenport
Group see ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/davenport/README.html
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Received on Friday, 16 June 1995 10:41:32 UTC