Network Working Group T.Kalin Internet-Draft DANTE Expires: November 5, 2006 M.Molina DANTE May 22, 2006 A URN Namespace for GEANT draft-kalin-geant-urn-namespace-00 Status of this Memo By submitting this Internet-Draft, each author represents that any applicable patent or other IPR claims of which he or she is aware have been or will be disclosed, and any of which he or she becomes aware will be disclosed, in accordance with Section 6 of BCP 79. 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 November 5, 2006. Copyright Notice Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2006). All Rights Reserved. Abstract This document describes a proposed URN (Uniform Resource Name) namespace that would be managed by DANTE for naming persistent resources defined by GEANT, its projects, activities, working groups and other designated subordinates. Kalin & Molina Expires November 22, 2006 [Page 1] Internet-Draft A URN Namespace for GEANT May 2006 1. Introduction and community considerations The Consortium of European Academic and Research Networks (GEANT) provides high-speed, high-quality network connectivity for education institutions, universities, and research centres in Europe. The network infrastructure is composed by several National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) and their European-wide interconnection, GEANT. The current network is GÉANT2 [6], and is the seventh gene- ration of pan-European research and education network, successor to the pan-European multi-gigabit research network GÉANT. DANTE [7] is a UK based organization representing the members of the Consortium and operating the GEANT2 Network. This cooperative work is mainly done in the framework of EU funded projects. The biggest of such activities is currently the Gn2 project [6], started Sep 2004, that follows other successful ones having evolved the European Networks for Research and Education for almost two decades. Itis expected that these activities and the network evolution will continue to be supported by European Union and all European Governments in the years to come, as the existence of a state of the art network for Research in Europe is viewed as top strategic importance by them. We will refer to the organisation involved in these projects or benefiting from their outcome as the "GEANT community". The GEANT community produces many kinds of documents: specifications, working drafts, project reports, schemas, stylesheets, etc. The community wishes to provide global, distributed, persistent, location-independent names for these resources. The Uniform Resource Name (URN) variant of URIs meets these requirements. The GEANT community and other GEANT-affiliated groups would benefit from the GEANT URN proposal by having an easy, efficient way to assign globally unique, persistent identifiers to resources that they create. The nature of GEANT work is that it is carried out to serve the needs of many communities of interest. A namespace managed so as to facilitate the creation, registration and resolution of unique, persistent identifiers would be of great value for GEANT, its affiliates and the higher education community generally. The possibility of fitting the naming needs under existing namespaces has been considered, but the conclusion was that the number of the activities and the size of the developers community is such that creating a lot of (possibly uncoordinated) dependencies from other namespaces is undesirable The proposed URN namespace specification is for a formal namespace. Kalin & Molina Expires November 22, 2006 [Page 2] Internet-Draft A URN Namespace for GEANT May 2006 2. Specification Template Namespace ID: "geant" requested. Registration Information: Registration Version Number 1 Registration Date: 2006-03-21 Registrant of the namespace: DANTE ATTN: Maurizio Molina City House 126 - 130 Hills Road Cambridge CB2 1PQ United Kingdom Phone: +44 1223 371340 Contact: Tomaz Kalin Affiliation: DANTE City House 126 - 130 Hills Road Cambridge CB2 1PQ tomaz.kalin@dante.org.uk Phone: +386 1 430 3055 Syntactic structure: The Namespace Specific Strings (NSS) of all URNs assigned by GEANT will conform to the syntax defined in section 2.2 of RFC2141, "URN Syntax." [1] In addition, all GEANT URN NSSs will consist of a left-to-right series of tokens delimited by colons. The left-to-right sequence of colon-delimited tokens corresponds to descending nodes in a tree. To the right of the Kalin & Molina Expires November 22, 2006 [Page 3] Internet-Draft A URN Namespace for GEANT May 2006 lowest naming authority node there may be zero, one or more levels of hierarchical naming nodes terminating in a rightmost leaf node. See the section entitled "Identifier assignment" below for more on the semantics of NSSs. This syntax convention is captured in the following normative ABNF rules for GEANT NSSs (see RFC2234): [2] GEANT-NSS = 1*(subStChar) 0*(":" 1*(subStChar)) subStChar = trans / "%" HEXDIG HEXDIG trans = ALPHA / DIGIT / other / reserved other = "(" / ")" / "+" / "," / "-" / "." / "=" / "@" / ";" / "$" / "_" / "!" / "*" / "'" reserved = "%" / "/" / "?" / "#" The exclusion of the colon from the list of "other" characters means that the colon can only occur as a delimiter between string tokens. Note that this ABNF rule set guarantees that any valid GEANT NSS is also a valid RFC2141 NSS. Relevant ancillary documentation: None. Identifier uniqueness: It is the responsibility of DANTE to guarantee uniqueness of the names of immediately subordinate naming authorities. Each lower-level naming authority in turn inherits the responsibility of guaranteeing uniqueness of names in their branch of the naming tree. Kalin & Molina Expires November 22, 2006 [Page 4] Internet-Draft A URN Namespace for GEANT May 2006 Identifier persistence: DANTE bears ultimate responsibility for maintaining the usability of GEANT urns over time. This responsibility may be delegated to subordinate naming authorities per the discussion in the section below on identifier assignment. That section provides a mechanism for the delegation to be revoked in the case a subordinate naming authority ceases to function. Identifier assignment: DANTE will create an initial series of immediately subordinate naming authorities, and will define a process for adding to that list of authorities. Each top-level working group of GEANT will be invited to designate a naming authority and to suggest one or more candidate names. Institutions and communities affiliated with GEANT may request, through their designated GEANT liaison, that they be granted GEANT-subordinate naming authority status. They may propose candidate names for that authority. One way for such entities to guarantee uniqueness of their proposed name is to base it on a DNS name. That is, if e.g. the German National Research and Education Network wished to be designated a subordinate naming authority under GEANT, the institutional GEANT liaison could propose to DANTE to be delegated control over names beginning with, "urn:geant:dfn.de." Institutions seeking affiliation with GEANT should send email to geant-submit@dante.org.uk, nominating an institutional liaison and providing contact information for that person. On at least an annual basis, DANTE will contact the liaisons or directors of each immediately subordinate naming authority. If there is no response, or if the respondent indicates that they wish to relinquish naming authority, the authority over that branch of the tree reverts to GEANT. This process will be enforced recursively by each naming authority on its subordinates. This process guarantees that responsibility for each branch of the tree will lapse for less than one year at worst before being reclaimed by a superior authority. Lexical equivalence of two GEANT namespace specific strings (NSSs) is defined below as an exact, case-sensitive string match. DANTE will assign names of immediately subordinate Kalin & Molina Expires November 22, 2006 [Page 5] Internet-Draft A URN Namespace for GEANT May 2006 naming authorities in lower case only. This forestalls the registration of two GEANT-subordinate naming authorities whose names differ only in case. Identifier resolution: DANTE will maintain an index of all GEANT and GEANT workgroup assigned URNs on its web site, http://www.dante.net/urn-geant/urn-geant.html. That index will map URNs to resource identifiers, usually URLs. GEANT- affiliated naming authorities will specify how to resolve the URNs they assign if they are resolvable. Lexical equivalence: Lexical equivalence of two GEANT namespace specific strings (NSSs) is defined as an exact, case-sensitive string match. Conformance with URN syntax: All GEANT NSSs fully conform to RFC2141 syntax rules for NSSs. Validation mechanism: As specified in the "Identifier resolution" section above, DANTE will maintain an index of all GEANT and GEANT workgroup assigned URNs on its web site, http://www.dante.net/urn-geant/urn-geant.html Presence in that index implies that a given URN is valid. GEANT-affiliated naming authorities will specify how to validate the URNs they assign. Scope: Global. Kalin & Molina Expires November 22, 2006 [Page 6] Internet-Draft A URN Namespace for GEANT May 2006 3. Security Considerations There are no additional security considerations beyond those normally associated with the use and resolution of URNs in general. Kalin & Molina Expires November 22, 2006 [Page 7] Internet-Draft A URN Namespace for GEANT May 2006 4. Namespace Considerations Registration of an NID specific to GEANT is reasonable given the following considerations: 1. GEANT would like to assign URNs to some very fine-grained objects This does not seem to be the primary intended use of the XMLORG namespace (RFC3120) [3], or the more tightly controlled OASIS namespace (RFC 3121) [4]. 2. GEANT seeks naming autonomy. GEANT is not a member of OASIS, so becoming a subordinate naming authority under the OASIS URN space is not an option. 3. GEANT will want to assign URNs to non-XML objects as well. That is another reason that XMLORG may not be an appropriate higher-level naming authority for GEANT. Some GEANT-developed schema and namespaces may be good candidates for inclusion in the XMLORG or possible future "EU" registry. The fact that such an object might already have a GEANT-assigned URN shouldn't be a hindrance. Work in progress to update RFC2611 [5] includes an explicit statement that two or more URNs may point to the same resource. A resource with a GEANT-assigned namespace-specific-string would, of course, be given an XMLORG or EU namespace-specific-string as it enters the XMLORG or "EU" registry. Kalin & Molina Expires November 22, 2006 [Page 8] Internet-Draft A URN Namespace for GEANT May 2006 5. IANA Considerations This document is intended as a formal request to IANA for the registration of a "GEANT" NID within the IANA registry of URN NIDs. Kalin & Molina Expires November 22, 2006 [Page 9] Internet-Draft A URN Namespace for GEANT May 2006 References [1] Moats, R., "URN Syntax", RFC 2141, May 1997. [2] Crocker, D. and P. Overell, "Augmented BNF for Syntax Specifications: ABNF", RFC 2234, November 1997. [3] Best, K. and N. Walsh, "A URN Namespace for XML.org", RFC 3120, June 2001. [4] Best, K. and N. Walsh, "A URN Namespace for OASIS", RFC 3121, June 2001. [5] Daigle, L., van Gulik, D., Iannella, R. and P. Faltstrom, "URN Namespace Definition Mechanisms", BCP 33, RFC 2611, June 1999. [6] GÉANT2 project's website http://www.geant2.net/ [7] DANTE's company website http://www.dante.net/ Authors' Addresses T. Kalin c/o DANTE City House 126 - 130 Hills Road Cambridge CB2 1PQ Unired Kingdom EMail: tomaz.kalin@dante.org.uk Maurizio Molina City House 126 - 130 Hills Road Cambridge CB2 1PQ United Kingdom EMail: maurizio.molina@dante.org.uk Kalin & Molina Expires November 22, 2006 [Page 10] Internet-Draft A URN Namespace for GEANT May 2006 Full Copyright Statement Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2006). All Rights Reserved. This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published and distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any kind, provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are included on all such copies and derivative works. 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