Subject: [urn] Please use real (or at least plausible) examples

From: Sean Leonard <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Sep 2015 16:20:34 -0700

Hello URNies:

I am catching up on a backlog of e-mail, including about seven months' 
worth of URN mailing list mail.

Having just attempted to absorb seven months' worth of "p-component 
this", "q-component that", "how many ? should we put in and what about 
LR vs. LALR grammar this and that" etc., I would like to ask the 
participants of this group, at least, *please* to use real (or at least 
plausible) examples of URNs that one reasonably expects to become common 
use. For example:

urn:isbn:978-3-598-24287-8??s=I2C&recordSchema=dc
    (note: the thread that I got this example from was very helpful)
urn:ietf:rfc:3986?ct=text/html#section-2.1
urn:oid:2.16.840.1.101.3.4.2.1

There has been a lot of theory in this WG but (relative to the 
ubiquitous use of URIs/URLs in modern society) we are short on 
implementations. Theorizing day and night about what URNs are has gotten 
us a lot of circumlocutory e-mail from a shrinking set of participants. 
As I recall asking this WG before, how about we pick several examples 
that we can agree to rough consensus are URNie, and then make sure that 
the URN requirements fit those things?

Identification schemes for produced works, such as ISBN, NBN, ISSN, etc. 
are clearly a class of identifiers that are intended for URNs. But that 
is only one class. I think that OID URNs are another distinct class, 
namely of identifiers for arbitrary objects that are of interest to some 
world, such as the world of telecommunications [see X.660], where the 
other design criteria for URNs are met (assigned once, not reassigned, 
kept track of, etc.). Yet another distinct class is identifiers that are 
very likely to yield a single media type or small handful of known media 
types, such as my proposed urn:cert (now withdrawn), which would have 
always yielded application/pkix-cert and thus f-components would be 
(potentially) well-defined. Presumably XML things such as schema and RDF 
node URIs would fall into a similar situation.

Respectfully submitted,

Sean