Subject: [urn] continued validity of URNs (CREF12)

From: Peter Saint-Andre - &yet <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2015 20:36:40 -0600

Section 6.1 states:

    3.  Commitment to not reassigning existing names and to allowing old
        names to continue to be valid, even if the owners or assignees of
        those names are no longer members or customers of that
        organization.  With regard to URN resolution [RFC2276], this does
        not mean that there needs to be resolution of such names, only
        that the names will not resolve to false or stale information.

CREF12 poses a question for the WG about how we should handle this 
question from Henry Thompson:

    "Really?  If a piece of retrievable metadata for some URN is the
    name and (postal) address of the publisher of whatever it
    identifies, and they've gone out of business, that metadata is
    necessarily stale, isn't it?"

First, I'm not sure what we mean by "retrievable metadata for some URN" 
here because I think it confuses the issue, which is about the URNs 
themselves.

Let's say that someone defines a urn:publisher namespace and that a 
publisher "Leblanc Press" is identified by urn:publisher:24601. The rule 
about not reassigning the URN doesn't have anything to do with the 
address of Leblanc Press, the continued business operations of Leblanc 
Press, or any other metadata associated with Leblanc Press. All it says 
is "don't reassign urn:publisher:24601 to, say, Madeleine Press". The 
URN always refers to Leblanc Press, even if that "resource" has been out 
of business for 1000 years.

If some clarifying text is in order here, let the authors know.

Peter

-- 
Peter Saint-Andre
https://andyet.com/