Re: draft-masinter-dated-uri-00.txt

On Sun, Aug 26, 2001 at 11:31:57PM -0700, Roy T. Fielding wrote:
> > Consider the ISBN scheme. Roy Fielding argued that because ISBN schemes are
> > reused, they cannot be URNs, but can be URIs. Of course, they *can* be URNs
> > because the persistence of an ISBN identifer is good enough to be used...
> > an ISBN identifier persistently identifies the book that most commonly has
> > that identifier printed on it somewhere. It is the identifier of a
> > currently published book using that identifier.
> 
> No, that's not what I was talking about.  The term "URN" refers to what is
> in the URN RFCs published by the IETF, not the generic notion of Names that
> you will often find in TimBL's, Dan Connolly's, or my own design notes.
> ISBN makes for excelent Names, but they are explicitly forbidden to be "URN"
> as described in the IETF RFCs because the naming authority does not
> guarantee their persistence over all time (not even over a short time).

I don't ever remember it being 'explicitly forbidden'. It was simply
pointed out as a problem that any ISBN namespace would have to address
if it was to be a URN scheme.  

Juha's document addresses it very much the way we expected it to. The 
cases where an ISBN gets 'reassigned' come in two forms: error and 
subjective equality. The first is rare and, because
its something done by humans, will always occur in any namespace. The
second is more subtle. When the publisher assigns the same ISBN to a what
you or I might consider another work it is not an error. It is a statement
of what the publisher considers 'equivalence'. If you want something
that has some vastly more granular naming system that forces publishers
to rev the name for any change whatsoever (book collectors would go so
far as to require a new name to be assigned if the type of paper changed
subtly during a print run) then that's another namespace run for 
different reasons.

-MM





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

Received on Monday, 27 August 2001 12:44:29 UTC