Network Working Group F. Bellifemine Internet-Draft Telecom Italia Lab Expires: 30 April 2002 I. Constantinescu EPFL S. Willmot UPC 29 October 2002 A URN Namespace for FIPA draft-bellifemine-urn-fipa-00 Status of this Memo This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet- Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at http:// www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt. The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html. This Internet-Draft will expire on April 30, 2002. Abstract This is an application for assignment of the URN NID "FIPA" to be used for identification of standard components published by the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents standards body [1] in the area of Agent technology. Table of Contents 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 2. Specification Template. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 3. Namespace Consideration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 4. Community Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 5. IANA Considerations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 6. Security Considerations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 7. Author Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . 6 8. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Bellifemine, et.al. Expires April 30 2002 [Page 1] Internet Draft A URN Namespace for FIPA 22 October 2002 1. Introduction The Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) was established in 1996 in Geneva, Switzerland. FIPA is an international non-profit association of companies and organizations dedicated to promoting the industry of intelligent agents by openly developing specifications supporting interoperability among agents and agent-based applications. The core mission of the FIPA standards consortium is to facilitate the interworking of agents and agent systems across multiple vendors' platforms. Since its inception, FIPA has counted more than 60 member companies from over 20 different countries worldwide. The Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) publishes technical specifications, schemas, diagrams and other documentation related to the area of Agent technology FIPA wishes to create and manage globally unique, persistent, location-independent identifiers for these resources. 2. Specification Template Namespace ID: "fipa" requested Registration Information: Version 1 Date: 2002-20-28 Declared registrant of the namespace: Name: FIPA Secretariat (J. Kelly) E-mail: secretariat@fipa.org Affiliation: Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) Address: c/o Me Jean-Pierre Jacquemoud 2, rue Bellot CH-1206 Geneve Declaration of structure: The identifier has a hierarchical structure as follows: urn::{subspace-id1}:{subspace-id2}:... subspace-ids can be any US-ASCII string compliant with URI syntax and not contaning the ":" character. The subspaces are used to divide the assigned namespace along one or more logical schemes. Examples of such schemes are: Bellifemine, et.al. Expires April 30 2002 [Page 2] Internet Draft A URN Namespace for FIPA 22 October 2002 * By standardisation area: urn:fipa:language:acl urn:fipa:ontology:management * By technical committee: urn:fipa:architecture:example:directory urn:fipa:architecture:example:greenpolicy Relevant ancillary documentation: None. Identifier uniqueness considerations: Assignment of URNs in the requested namespace will be managed by the FIPA Architecture Board (FAB) which will ensure that URNs assigned in the requested namespace are unique. Identifier persistence considerations: FIPA is committed to maintaining the availability and persistance of all resources identified by assigned URNs. Process of identifier assignment: Assignment of URNs in the requested namespace will be managed by the FIPA Architecture Board (FAB) which is responsible for approval of all specifications published by FIPA. Process for identifier resolution: FIPA will maintain published lists of assigned identifiers on its web pages at http://www.fipa.org. Rules for Lexical Equivalence: URNs are lexically equivalent if they are lexically identical. Conformance with URN Syntax: No special considerations. Validation mechanism: None specified. Scope: Global. Bellifemine, et.al. Expires April 30 2002 [Page 3] Internet Draft A URN Namespace for FIPA 22 October 2002 3. Namespace Considerations As part of the consideration of the URN namespace issue FIPA has engaged in a survey of existing and proposed URN NID schemes which might be used instead of applying for a dedicated scheme. FIPA's specific requiements are that the namespace should be: - globally unique, - persistent, - location-independent - relfect the logical structure of FIPA specifications (see section 3) - be purely logical and without reference to "location" related elements such as (in particular) domain names / DNS entries such as URLs - be managed by the FIPA organisation to ensure the integrity, correctness and uniquness of the namespace. The closest to the requirements identified by FIPA were the proposed VOC [3] and TAG [2] schemes: - In particular TAG could be used in conjunction with the domain name "fipa.org" which FIPA has registered to generate unique identifiers. However the problems with this scheme from FIPA's perspective are (in order of importance): * it has not yet (to our knowledge) been approved / accepted by IESG or IANA (making it inapproriate for use in a standards document) * the labels generated related to the time date, owner of the label but specify no particular semantics for the content/text of the label which would be desirable to identify a hierarchy of standards * The uniqueness in the scheme is DNS based - VOC provides a more logical structure for a logical hierarchy of specifications but still presents the following problems: * it has not yet (to our knowledge) been approved / accepted by IESG or IANA making it inapproriate for use in a standards document) * The uniqueness in the scheme is DNS based In both cases there is no clear authority for managing the correctness of the namespace. 4. Community Considerations FIPA standards address the area of interoperability between autonomous software systems (agents) in open environments such as company intranets or the Internet itself. Communication between such systems is highly contigent on developers and the systems themselves being able to Bellifemine, et.al. Expires April 30 2002 [Page 4] Internet Draft A URN Namespace for FIPA 22 October 2002 unambiguously identify which technology specifications (interaction protocols, languages, domain descriptions and the like) are to be used for particular purposes in any given interaction. The use of a managed, unique namespace for FIPA specification components would therefore be of great benefit: - to the fipa standards process: providing unique labels for individual specification components - to developers implementing systems based on FIPA standards: identifying which specifications are in use in a particular system, allowing them to develop software able to flexibly distinguish between different technologies used. - to users of networks making use of FIPA technology (in whole or in part): imporving the integrity and clarity of interactions in the system, allowing them to precisely identify technology requirements for interacting with any given software system using FIPA technology. Whilst the assignment of identifiers is managed by the FIPA Architecture Board the application for identifiers is through the open FIPA standards process - thus anybody following the process is entitled to request an identifier for technologies they consider relevant to FIPA's work. Final acceptance of any FIPA standard is contingent on a vote of the FIPA membership. Although membership is not free (see [1] for details of costs), it is open to any organisation with an interest in FIPA's work. The initial plans for identifier resolution are to host a web page on http://www.fipa.org to provide for resolution of identifiers FIPA will also encourage third parties (fipa members and others) to host more advance dereferencing service or to develop software to provide dereferencing where these provide a correct and accurate reflection of the namespace. FIPA itself may also engage in such activities. 5. IANA Considerations This document includes a URN NID registration that is to be entered in the IANA registry of URN NID's. To our knowledge the NID has not been registered by anybody to date and meets the syntactic requirements to be a formal NID rather than experimental (X-...) or other types of informal NID layed out in RFC 2611. 6. Security Considerations No special security considerations. Bellifemine, et.al. Expires April 30 2002 [Page 5] Internet Draft A URN Namespace for FIPA 22 October 2002 7. Author Addresses Fabio Bellifemine Chair of the FIPA Architecture Board Telecom Italia Lab Email: Fabio.Bellifemine@TILAB.COM Ion Constantinescu EPFL Email: ion.constantinescu@epfl.ch Steven Willmott Universitat Politˆcnica de Catalunya Email: steve@lsi.upc.es 8. References [1] Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents. http://www.fipa.org/ [2] Kindberg, T. and Hawke, S. "The 'tag' URI scheme and URN namespace", September 2001. IETF Internet Draft draft-kindberg-tag-uri-04.txt [3] Stickler, P. "The 'voc:' URI scheme for Vocabulary Terms and Codes, January 2002, http://www-nrc.nokia.com/sw/draft-pstickler-voc-00.html. Bellifemine, et.al. Expires April 30 2002 [Page 6]