Re: [urn] Re: Proposal: urn:local: namespace for context-scoped identifiers

[Moving urn@ietf.org to bcc]

On 1/26/26 7:03 AM, Melvin Carvalho wrote:

> I wanted to briefly share an observation that motivated the original 
> proposal and may be relevant to whether a URI scheme is worth pursuing.
> 
> In two separate, unprompted cases, different large language models 
> generating structured data independently produced identifiers of the 
> form `urn:local:` and, in another instance, `local://`. When asked to 
> explain, the models described these as an intuitive way to signal "local 
> by design". I appreciate we are somewhat in the wild west in this regard 
> still. But it is likely that engineering on the internet will 
> increasingly use such tools.

God help us when LLMs start registering URI schemes and URN namespaces.

> I don’t present this as authoritative input, LLMs are not standards 
> bodies. However, the convergent emergence is interesting: systems 
> trained on existing URI/URN specifications nonetheless reach for a 
> “local” identifier when faced with this gap.
> 
> This suggests:
> 1. There is a real unmet need for signaling context-scoped identity
> 2. “local” is an intuitive and discoverable name for that concept
> 3. Such identifiers are likely to appear in generated data regardless of 
> formal standardization
> 
> Given the feedback in this thread, would there be interest in exploring 
> `local:` as a URI scheme (not URN), incorporating the constraints and 
> concerns raised here?

Perhaps, but thankfully that's not a job for the URN discussion list, 
which I've removed from this thread. :-)

Peter
(as team lead for the URN expert review team)

Received on Monday, 26 January 2026 17:34:19 UTC