In respect of ISBN URNs

In respect of ISBN URNs, RFC 3187 provides this resolution statement in the
URN NID template:

  "Identifier resolution process:

   URNs based on ISBNs will be primarily resolved via the national
   bibliography databases.  Since ISBN group agencies are as a rule
   located in national libraries, the national bibliography databases
   cover almost every publication which does have an ISBN.

   If group identifier does not define a country but a language area
   there may be many countries using the same group identifier.  In such
   cases, the International ISBN Agency has divided publisher
   identifiers into ranges assigned to each country within the group.
   The appropriate resolution service can be found by using the group
   identifier and publisher identifier information.  Alternatively a
   cascade of national bibliographies can be defined.

   Resolution carried out in national bibliography databases may be
   complemented by so called union catalogues, which contain huge amount
   of bibliographic data (up to 42 million records).  This complementary
   service is only needed if the ISBN group identifier information is
   misleading.  This is not common.

   The International ISBN Agency maintains a list of publishers who have
   been assigned a publisher identifier within the ISBN system.  The
   publisher identifier may be used to allow participation of resolution
   services maintained by publishers into the URN resolution system for
   ISBN."

Whether workable, or not, the clear intent is to provide resolution services
for these identifiers. The "info" URI scheme expresly forbids resolution for
clarity and simplicity. Its sole mission is the projection of identitiy onto
the Web.

Tony


-----Original Message-----
From: Nick Matsakis [mailto:matsakis@mit.edu]
Sent: 13 November 2003 15:00
To: Stefano Mazzocchi
Cc: Hammond, Tony (ELSLON); SIMILE public list
Subject: Re: Best practices using URIs




On Thu, 13 Nov 2003, Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:

>   urn:isbn:0465026567
>   http://www.iso.org/ISBN/0465026567
>
> even if treated as URI, ... the second *could* be used as a URL to
> lookup and discovery information on that particular resource, while the
> first does *NOT* include a methodology to do the above and it's left as
> application dependent.

Over and over I have seen RDF with "http:" URLs, and it is extremely rare
for such URLs to resolvable to anything besides '404 Document not found'.
The second URL you provide continues this trend.  This may be a losing
battle, but it seems easier to design applications where the vast majority
of URIs were not resolvable, but the occasional one was. It would be in
this case that your application could know it was appropriate to go out on
to the internet for more information.

If you are creating a URI for a book, such as "urn:isbn:0465026567" it
only takes one more statement to give a resolvable location for that item.
For example:

urn:isbn:0465026567 :pdfVersionAt http://myserver.mydomain/...

Most of the other metadata associated with the item, such as its title,
page count, authors, etc. are in no way dependent on the fact that a
version can be downloaded from a particular server at the moment.  If, in
the future, that version cannot be retrieved, the single statement can be
removed, leaving the rest of the metadata intact.

Nick Matsakis

Received on Thursday, 13 November 2003 10:10:55 UTC