- From: Larry Masinter <LMM@acm.org>
- Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2003 22:52:25 -0700
- To: uri@w3.org, urn-nid@lists.verisignlabs.com
- Cc: leslie@thinkingcat.com, thiemann@acm.org
I've come to a new opinion about the role of URN namespaces and URI schemes. My new opinion is that URN namespaces should be used exactly for 'naming authority assignment' schemes, nothing else, and for all of them. While permanent assignment is a desirable property, it is not definitional. Other schemes for naming which do not require a namespace authority to assign a name (such as 'hash') should instead register new URI schemes. Those that are not of sufficient interest to the internet community, or that don't want to describe their schemes, should use 'vnd-' or 'org-'. For URN namespaces, the namespace name should accurately identify the organization doing the assignment completely unambiguously. I think this is a consistent and meaningful policy that removes some of the ambiguity over the URN/URI choice. So, for example: doi:, info:, hdl: These should all be URN namespaces (but with more appropriate names) hash: This should be a URI scheme (like data). tdb: and duri: These should be URI schemes, not URN namespaces tag: I think 'tag:' fits more as a URN scheme, but I'm not sure. The naming authority is definitely the email address / domain name owner. Larry
Received on Tuesday, 16 September 2003 01:54:02 UTC