Subject: [URN] question about version and manifestation

From: lislee <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Feb 1999 14:34:24 +0900

I am a student interested in URN.

I have one question.
Anybody tell me about the question..

IF:
There is one resource(e.g. personal homepage).
It's URN is <urn:yonsei:lis.99-1>
When the author revised the homepage,
I wonder whether it is given new URN or not?

I think copies of the same document shall all use the same URN.
(this document has one URN but several URLs)

When versions of one document are different(e.g. a text file in MS Word
and HTML), but their intelligent contents are same perfectly, should
they have their own URN?
If they should, why?

And when the document is edited, is new URN needed?
If it is, why?

When the author added new contents, I think, it shoud have new URN.
When the author fixed to typing error, is new URN needed?

Please reply to me.

I'll wait for your reply.

---

From: Michael Mealling <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Feb 1999 01:29:40 -0500 (EST)

> I wonder whether it is given new URN or not?

It depends on the rules of the 'yonsei' namespace. If they decide
that each revision requires a new URN then that applies, if not then
it is probably left up to the author.

> (this document has one URN but several URLs)

If that is the policy the 'yonsei' namespace has, then yes...

> and HTML), but their intelligent contents are same perfectly, should

It depends on the namespace definition. If _I_ were designing a namespace
then I would probably specify that each format type and all revisions
fell under the same URN.

> And when the document is edited, is new URN needed?

Again, it depends on the namespace. In my own opinion new revisions would
still fall under the same URN. In the case of a revision control system
I suspect each revision would also get a new URN...
> When the author fixed to typing error, is new URN needed?

We started out asking questions like that and realised that the answer
depended mostly on the authors own view of the world and thus no one
from the outside could dictate a policy decision like that. Thus we
came up with the concept of the Namespace Identifier which is the part
of the URN that defines which sets of rules that subset of the 
namespace will follow.

For example, the ISBN namespace follows rules setup by publishers. In 
their world different printings and editions are very important things to
keep track of. In many situations they assign a new ISBN number even 
if they are simply printing a new set of the same thing over again.
In their case, each new edition gets a new ISBN number and thus a new
URN. Their URNs would look something like this:
	URN:ISBN:0-672-52383-3

Now, in the case of something like a URN namespace defined specifically
for web pages on the net, the decision to create a new URN or stick with
the old one is really left up to the author of the web page. It is up
to the author to determine if the web page should be considered the same
by its readers. 

I hope I've helped. If not please feel free to ask more questions. 
The mailing list has been kind of slow recently so some educational
discussion would be a nice change...

-MM

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