Subject: a META URN?

From: "Arnold G. Reinhold" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2001 10:49:01 -0400

I am new to this list and have been reviewing the archives. In
reading the thread on the  OID  names space a thought occurred to me
that may be of interest. I realized that it may have been discussed
before or be way out of scope, but here it is for what is is worth.
One point of discussion was whether or not the OID namespace should
include the text tags for each node of the OID tree as seen here:

urn:oid:itu-t(0)/identified-organization(4)/etsi(0)/electronic-signatu
re-standard(1733)/part1(1)/idupMechanism(4)/etsiESv1(1)

or, as ultimately proposed, only include the digits themselves as seen here:

urn:oid:0.4.0.1733.1.4.1

While I agree that text tags should be omitted, nonetheless, it would
be helpful to have a way of obtaining the text tags for a full or
partial OID URN. The same might be true of other URN name spaces.
While it seems clear that the choice to provide such a service should
be up to the name space owner, it might be useful to have a standard
way to reference such a service.  This lead me to think about other
such services and I came up with a rather long list of  meta data
services that might be of general use over the spectrum of NIDs.

It might be useful to have a standard name for these meta services,
whenever the service exists. One could reserve names within each name
space, perhaps by using a character that is now reserved. A less
intrusive approach would be to create a new NID for meta services.

URN:META:<meta-service-ID> <meta-service-modifiers>
<meta-special-charcter> <URN>

where:

    meta-service-ID is the number assigned to a service

    meta-service-modifiers might designate language requested, meta
data subfields, etc.

    the meta-special-charcter would be serve as a delimiter and would
be illegal in the  meta-service-ID and meta-service-modifiers fields,
but could occur subsequently in the referenced URN.

Here are some possible meta services I came up with that would apply
to an entire name space:

    Name space owner

    Owner contact information

    Available Meta services

    Meta data encoding (ISO, Unicode, UTF-8,...)

    Available languages for Meta data (rfc1766)

    Owner public key

    NID RFC

    NID RFC  version history

    URN assignment information (how to register a name)

    Content purchase/subscription information

    Content licensing information

    Pricing currency

    Legal notices (copyright, privacy restrictions, license terms, etc)

    Integrity verification executable object

    Signature executable object

    Decompression executable object

    Software library

    Search service

Here are some metadata types that would apply on a per-URN basis.
Where possible, the types here might be coordinated with the Dublin
Core Metadata Initiative http://dublincore.org/

    Interpretation of URN string

    Title

    Abstract

    Table of Contents

    Date

    File size

    Integrity verifier (e.g. hash value)

    File format

    Language (rfc1766)

    Price

    Signature

    Integrity verification algorithm

    Signature algorithm

    Compression algorithm

At the least, it would be useful to reserve the URN name META for
this type of service.

Arnold Reinhold