Network Working Group                                           W. Hoehn
Internet-Draft                                                D. Millman
Category: Informational                              Columbia University
Document: draft-hoehn-nsdl-urn-namespace-01.txt                D. Fulker
Expires: February 05, 2004                             NSDL Headquarters
                                                         August 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
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   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.









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 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:

         <NSDLURN> ::= "urn:nsdl:" <NSS>

      where <NSS> 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



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   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



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 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































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