Subject: [urn] exemplary URNs for revised URN syntax

From: Sean Leonard <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 3 Nov 2014 01:57:12 -0500

It would be helpful for this URNBIS discussion if we can agree on a common set of exemplary URN namespaces, where there is rough consensus that whatever URNs are supposed to be, these URN namespaces are “quality” and we can all think about them for the purpose of making cogent arguments.

I consider the following namespaces to be exemplary:
urn:isbn
urn:ucode
urn:issn
urn:ietf
urn:oid
urn:uuid
urn:lex [latest Internet-Draft]

Anything else?

Sean

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From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 03 Nov 2014 11:12:27 -0500

> urn:lex [latest Internet-Draft]

The problem with casting things in this light is that URNs were 
originally intended to be identifiers for network-accessible resources.  
Even though they were considered suitable as names for other kinds of 
resources, the primary reason for creating URNs was that there wasn't a 
good stable naming scheme for resources accessible over the network.    
Most of the examples you've cited above don't really fit that pattern. 
    And in a desire to better accommodate use of URNs with 
non-network-accessible resources, there's been an unfortunate tendency 
to want to compromise URNs' suitability for network-accessible resources 
(say by repurposing query syntax in such a way that it can no longer be 
used to query the resource itself, or by allowing interpretation of 
modifiers to vary on a per-NID basis).

So while it's fine to cite examples from time to time, please don't get 
into the habit of thinking that these examples really illustrate what 
URNs are.   URNs are still in their infancy, and if we are at all 
successful, they're likely to get used in many more ways in the future 
than they are at present.

Keith