Network Working Group N. Walsh Internet-Draft No organization Expires: January 12, 2001 July 14, 2000 A URN Namespace for Norman Walsh draft-nwalsh-urn-ndw-00 Status of this Memo This document is an Internet-Draft and is NOT offered in accordance with Section 10 of RFC2026, and the author does not provide the IETF with any rights other than to publish as an Internet-Draft. 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 January 12, 2001. Abstract This document describes a URN namespace that is engineered by Norman Walsh for naming personal resources such as XML Schema Namespaces, Schemas, Stylesheets, and other documents. 1. Introduction For some years, the author has been producing internet resources: documents, schemas, stylesheets, etc. In addition to providing URLs for these resources, the author wishes to provide location-independent names. In the past, this has been accomplised with Formal Public Identifiers (FPIs). FPIs provided the author with a mechanism for assigning unique, permanent location-independent names to resources. The Extensible Markup Language (XML) requires that all resources provide a system identifier which must be a URI and XML Namespaces Walsh Expires January 12, 2001 [Page 1] Internet-Draft A URN Namespace for Norman Walsh July 2000 require authors to identify namespaces by URI alone (it is not possible to provide an FPI for an XML Namespace identifier). Motivated by these observations, the author would like to assign URNs to some resources in order to retain unique, permanent location-independent names for them. This namespace specification is for a formal namespace. 2. Specification Template Namespace ID: "ndw" requested. Registration Information: Registration Version Number: 1 Registration Date: 2000-07-14 Declared registrant of the namespace: Norman Walsh ndw@nwalsh.com Declaration of structure: Opaque. The URNs assigned by the author will have internal structure, but the structure is not expected to be manifestly obvious to an outside observer. Relevant ancillary documentation: None Identifier uniqueness considerations: The versioned and distinct nature of the resources themselves makes duplication unlikely, but in the interest of providing concrete assurances, the owner agrees to maintain a table of assigned URNs and to absolutely avoid duplication by consulting that table before each new URN is published. Identifier persistence considerations: To the best of the namespace owner's ability, the usability of URNs will last as long as the resources they identify are reasonably useful. Walsh Expires January 12, 2001 [Page 2] Internet-Draft A URN Namespace for Norman Walsh July 2000 Process of identifier assignment: Assignment is limited to the owner and those authorities that are specifically designated by the owner. Process of identifier resolution: The owner will distribute catalogs (e.g., OASIS Open TR9401 Catalogs) that map the subset of URNs considered useful to resource identifiers (e.g., URLs). In addition, the owner will provide an online resolution service based on RFC2483. The owner will authorize additional resolution services as appropriate. Rules for Lexical Equivalence: URNs are lexically equivalent if they are lexically identical. Conformance with URN Syntax: No special considerations. Validation mechanism: None specified. The owner will publish the table of assigned URNs online. Scope: Global 3. Examples The following examples are not guaranteed to be real. They are listed for pedagogical reasons only. urn:ndw:stylesheets:xsl:docbook:1.15 urn:ndw:doctypes:slides:1.25 urn:ndw:xsl:documentation:1.0 4. Security Considerations There are no additional security considerations other than those normally associated with the use and resolution of URNs in general. References [1] Goldfarb, C. F., "ISO (International Organization for Walsh Expires January 12, 2001 [Page 3] Internet-Draft A URN Namespace for Norman Walsh July 2000 Standardization) ISO 8879:1986(E) Information Processing -- Text and Office Systems -- Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML)", 1986. [2] W3C, XML WG, "Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0", February 1998, . [3] W3C, Namespaces WG, "Namespaces in XML", January 1999, . [4] OASIS, Entity Mgmt. TC, "Entity Management: OASIS Technical Resolution 9401:1997 (Amendment 2 to TR 9401)", January 1994, . [5] Moats, R., "URN Syntax", RFC 2141, May 1997. [6] Mealling, M. and R. Daniel, "URI Resolution Services Necessary for URN Resolution", RFC 2483, January 1999. Author's Address Norman Walsh No organization EMail: ndw@nwalsh.com URI: http://nwalsh.com/~ndw/ Walsh Expires January 12, 2001 [Page 4]