Subject: OID URN NID issues.....

From: Michael Mealling <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 4 Jan 2001 11:01:58 -0500

Hi all,
  After dealing with the holidays and the flu I've finally been able to
review the discussion on the OID NID registration. The major point of
discussion was whether or not the namespace should include the text tags
for each node of the OID tree as seen here:

urn:oid:itu-t(0)/identified-organization(4)/etsi(0)/electronic-signature-sta
ndard(1733)/part1(1)/idupMechanism(4)/etsiESv1(1)

or, as proposed, only include the digits themselves as seen here:

urn:oid:0.4.0.1733.1.4.1

It became apparent in the discussion that the text tags were meant only
to aid in reading by a human and in no way added to the uniqueness or
persistence of the name (the point was made that the text tag actually
harmed persistence due to semantic drift of semantically loaded tag names).

The point was also made that the tagname was not required to be the same
and in many cases wasn't (translations). This created the case where two
OID URNs would contain the same OID but according to URI matching rules
would be two different URIs.

Based on the concensus of this list and the issues brought up I am
sugggesting that the OID namespace be registered in its current form
as specified in RFC 3001.

-MM

P.S. administrivia: due to a snafu with document versions RFC 3001
will be updated to include a corrected registrant section. Nothing
will change except the RFC number....

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Michael Mealling        |      Vote Libertarian!       | www.rwhois.net/michael
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