Subject: [urn] Status of WG documents

From: Mykyta Yevstifeyev <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 05 Mar 2011 14:05:53 +0200

Hello all,

WG documents 2141bis, 3406bis and others haven't been updated for, at 
the moment, nearly 3 months.  Moreover, there are no discussions on the 
WG mailing list, and they haven;t occurred for nearly 1.5 months.  My 
question is - what is going to be done in th near future?  WG was 
chartered to:

> Feb 2011 WGLC on rfc2141bis, rfc3406bis, rfc3187bis-isbn-urn and 
> rfc3188bis-nbn-urn 

And nothing like this occurred.

Mykyta Yevstifeyev

---

From: Juha Hakala <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 07 Mar 2011 09:01:09 +0200

Hello Mykyta,

2141bis and 3406bis were written by Alfred Hönes who has been very busy 
lately and unable to invest time on producing 01 versions of these 
drafts. This task, however, has not been passed to somebody else, since 
I have understood that Alfred will be able to continue editing these 
texts in the future.

As regards the URN syntax, the key issue - at least from my point of 
view - that should be discussed more widely is the usage of <fragment> 
and <query> in the way suggested in RFC2141bis. The reason why it is 
vital to make firm decisions concerning these features is that there are 
projects that intend to use both of them, and must have explicit 
permission and guidelines for doing that.

I have been responsible of the I-Ds RFC3187bis and RFC3188bis. Both of 
these texts were released originally as individual contributions prior 
to publication as a WG contribution. There is a need for further 
revisions, but as far as I am concerned only after there is an agreement 
on the content of 2141bis and 3406bis. For instance, it is likely that 
the NBN namespace will support fragment identifiers (if fragments are 
allowed), while no such need exists for ISBN namespace.

The ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) International Centre 
(http://www.issn.org/) is working on RFC3044bis. I do not know when they 
will be able to publish I-D version 0; the ISSN standard was revised a 
few years ago in such a way that major revision of RFC 3044 is necessary.

In the current situation it is not possible to extend the charter of the 
URNBIS WG; the existing drafts must reach the WGLC status first. 
Nevertheless I have asked Andrew Newton if it were a good idea to 
prepare and send to the list a memo on the need to revise RFC 2483, URI 
resolution services necessary for URN resolution. Andrew said that 
others may find such a document helpful too, so I will proceed with this.

The problem in a nutshell is that RFC 2483 is experimental and based on 
the best understanding the community had in the late 90s. Since then we 
have built functional URN resolution services, digital asset management 
systems have matured and digital preservation systems have emerged. 
There are also other persistent identifier systems which provide 
services that are beyond the scope of RFC 2483. Given this background, 
it is not suprising that some URN-based projects such as PersID have 
identified additional services that could / should be supported by the 
URN system.

Since we know now that the list of services that can / should be 
supported will change over time when the technology changes, I believe 
that a less rigid system than specifying the services in a standards 
track RFC is needed. IANA registry of resolution formal / informal / 
experimental URN resolution services is one option.

More about this later this week.

Best regards,

Juha Hakala

Mykyta Yevstifeyev wrote:
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> _______________________________________________
> urn mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/urn

-- 

  Juha Hakala
  Senior advisor, standardisation and IT

  The National Library of Finland
  P.O.Box 15 (Unioninkatu 36, room 503), FIN-00014 Helsinki University
  Email [email-masked], tel +358 50 382 7678