Network Working Group W. Hoehn Internet-Draft D. Millman Category: Informational Columbia University Document: draft-hoehn-nsdl-urn-namespace-00.txt D. Fulker Expires: February 05, 2004 NSDL Headquarters Auguest 05, 2003 A URN Namespace for NSDL 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 February 05, 2004. Abstract This document describes a Uniform Resource Name (URN) namespace that is managed by the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) for the purpose of uniquely naming persistent resources published by NSDL. Copyright Notice Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2003). All Rights Reserved. Hoehn, Millman, & Fulker [Page 1] Internet-Draft A URN Namespace for NSDL August 2003 1. Introduction NSDL is a digital library of exemplary resource collections and services, organized in support of science education at all levels. Starting with a partnership of NSF-funded projects, NSDL is a center of innovation in digital libraries as applied to education, and a community center for groups focused on digital library-enabled science education. NSDL produces schemas, specifications, protocols, and other definitions for use by both the NSDL community and the broader digital library community. NSDL would like to assign URNs to some resources in order to provide unique, permanent, and location-independent names for them. This namespace specification is for a formal namespace. 2. Specification Template Namespace ID: "nsdl" requested. Registration Information: Version 1 Date: 2003-08-05 Declared registrant of the namespace: NSDL Headquarters UCAR-NSDL P.O. Box 3000 Boulder, CO 80307 urn-authority@nsdl.org. Declaration of syntactic structures: NSDL issued URNs have the following syntax: ::= "urn:nsdl:" where is a string that conforms to URN syntax requirements specified in RFC2141 [1]. The structure of the Namespace Specific String (NSS) is opaque and implies no semantic content. Relevant Ancillary Documentation: None Hoehn, Millman, & Fulker [Page 1] Internet-Draft A URN Namespace for NSDL August 2003 Identifier uniqueness considerations: Identifier uniqueness will be enforced by a designate of the Executive Director of the NSDL Headquarters. This designate, hereafter referred to as the "NSDL URN Authority", is responsible for management of the NSDL URN namespace. Identifiers Persistence considerations: The NSDL URN Authority is responsible for assigning identifiers in a fashion which guarantees that names are not reassigned. Process of identifiers assignment: Identifier assignment is controlled by the NSDL URN Authority. Under certain circumstances, the NSDL URN Authority may delegate portions of the namespace for assignment by other parties. Questions regarding URN assignment should be routed to urn-authority@nsdl.org. Process for identifier resolution: No RDS specified. Rules for lexical equivalence: Lexical equivalence is defined as an exact, case-sensitive string match. Conformance with URN syntax: No special consideration. Validation Mechanism: None specified. Scope: For use within the NSDL community. 3. Examples The following examples are not guaranteed to be real. They are listed for pedagogical reasons only. urn:nsdl:AMS:site:columbia.edu urn:nsdl:AMS:attribute:displayName Hoehn, Millman, & Fulker [Page 1] Internet-Draft A URN Namespace for NSDL August 2003 4. Security Considerations Since the URNs in this namespace are opaque there are no additional security considerations other than those normally associated with the use and resolution of URNs in general. References [1] Moats, R., "URN Syntax", RFC 2141, May 1997. Author's Address Walter Hoehn Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia (EPIC) 510 Butler Library Columbia University 535 W 114th St New York, NY 10027 email: wassa@columbia.edu