Subject: [urn] Focus of the discussion

From: Alfred Hönes <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2010 17:18:13 +0200 (MESZ)

Folks,
I have listend to the discussion so far this week, and I appreciate
its breadth and depth (and the range of contributors).

However, we are not yet in a stage where technical details of the
documents to be revised are ready for consensus-building.  This will
be the task of the WG, once established.

So may I ask you to re-focus the discussion on the proposed charter?
(See <http://www.IETF.ORG/mail-archive/web/urn/current/msg00006.html>).

Of course, collecting facts and requirements from existing URN
namespaces is encouraged as well, but we should prioritize now
the necessary steps to have a sucessful BoF in Maastricht.

The draft charter sketches three groups of work items and tries to
give the direction of work.  Let's take a look at these.

AFAICS, there already seems to be rough consensus that the 'core'
URN documents need updates, and that these updates need to be performed
with a conservative attitude, but -- according to the basic principles
of the IETF -- also taking into account experiences and "running code".
The experiences that led to RFC 3986 are part of this 'knowledge'.

Also, feedback from the ISSN authorities indicate that URN:ISSN
indeed deserves a revised specification.  So, with regard to the
work already in progress, the three namespaces for bibliographic
identifiers mentioned in the second group of work items in the
initial draft charter (ISBN, NBN, and ISSN) indeed should be
regarded as confirmed work items.

Some of the discussion so far has scratched at the basic understanding
of the role of URNs, and much of that is related to the third part
of work suggested in the initial draft charter.  So there seems to
be interest in taking on work in this area as well.

So please comment on the scope of the WG as envisioned in the draft
charter, and on ways how it should be refined/improved.  The most
productive way to do so -- as always -- is to propose text snippets.

Kind regards,
  Alfred.

-- 

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From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2010 16:58:43 -0400

I am strongly of the opinion that the WG MUST be constrained from
attempting to change the intent of the original URN specifications; or
for that matter the specifications themselves except as necessary to
clarify, correct errata, and reconcile apparent differences with other
standards.

History suggests that discussions about naming are very contentious. 
They seem to bring people out of the woodwork who want this kind of name
to serve whatever purpose they hope to serve, whether or not that is the
intent behind that kind of name.  We had that problem with the original
URN discussions.  We also had that problem with discussions around
"human friendly names" and similar ideas.  To some degree we've even had
that problems with discussions of URLs, and there is a long history of
contention on use of DNS names.

The battle for control of URNs needs to not be revisited.   Those
decisions have already been made, and they were hard fought.  People who
want URNs to be something significantly different than they were
originally specified to be need to go elsewhere, or start from scratch
to convince the community that a new kind of name is needed.  This is
especially important to preserve the persistence qualities of URNs. 

This needs to be made very clear in the group's charter, and right now
there's not even a hint of that.

Keith