At 13:53 -0500 2/11/06, Leslie Daigle wrote:
In case anyone else, as I did, lost track of this while waiting for
it to appear in the drafts repository, it did eventually appear:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-kalin-geant-urn-namespace-00.txt
Comments on the document itself:
It needs to use (and therefore reference) the updated registration
document, RFC3406, instead of this one:
[5] Daigle, L., van Gulik, D., Iannella, R. and P. Faltstrom, "URN
Namespace Definition Mechanisms", BCP 33, RFC 2611, June 1999.
To that end, it's also missing a "Community Considerations" section.
Leslie.
Dear Leslie,
Thank you for pointing out that I have to reference the current RFC.
Attached is the version-01 of the document.
Best regards
Tomaz
Network Working Group T.Kalin
Internet-Draft DANTE
Expires: May 3 2007 M.Molina
DANTE
November 3,
2006
A URN Namespace for GEANT
draft-kalin-geant-urn-namespace-01
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Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2006). All Rights Reserved.
Abstract
This document describes a proposed URN (Uniform Resource Name)
namespace that would be managed by DANTE, representing European
Research and academic networks, for naming persistent resources
defined by GEANT, the Consortium of European R&E networks, its
projects, activities, working groups and other designated
subordinates.
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1. Introduction and community considerations
The Consortium of European Academic and Research Networks (GEANT)
provides high-speed, high-quality network connectivity for education
institutions, universities, and research centres in Europe. The
network infrastructure is composed by several National Research and
Education Networks (NRENs) and their European-wide interconnection,
GEANT. The current network is GÉANT2 [6], and is the seventh gene-
ration of pan-European research and education network, successor to
the pan-European multi-gigabit research network GÉANT. DANTE [7] is a
UK based organization representing the members of the Consortium and
operating the GEANT2 Network. This cooperative work is mainly done in
the framework of EU funded projects. The biggest of such activities is
currently the Gn2 project [6], started Sep 2004, that follows other
successful ones having evolved the European Networks for Research and
Education for almost two decades. Itis expected that these activities
and the network evolution will continue to be supported by European
Union and all European Governments in the years to come, as the
existence of a state of the art network for Research in Europe is
viewed as top strategic importance by them. We will refer to the
organisation involved in these projects or benefiting from their
outcome as the "GEANT community".
The GEANT community produces many kinds of documents: specifications,
working drafts, project reports, schemas, stylesheets, etc.
The community wishes to provide global, distributed, persistent,
location-independent names for these resources. The Uniform Resource
Name (URN) variant of URIs meets these requirements.
The GEANT community and other GEANT-affiliated groups would benefit
from the GEANT URN proposal by having an easy, efficient way to
assign globally unique, persistent identifiers to resources that they
create. The nature of GEANT work is that it is carried out to serve
the needs of many communities of interest. A namespace
managed so as to facilitate the creation, registration and resolution
of unique, persistent identifiers would be of great value for GEANT,
its affiliates and the higher education community generally.
The possibility of fitting the naming needs under existing namespaces
has been considered, but the conclusion was that the number of the
activities and the size of the developers community is such that
creating a lot of (possibly uncoordinated) dependencies from other
namespaces is undesirable
The proposed URN namespace specification is for a formal namespace.
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2. Specification Template
Namespace ID:
"geant" requested.
Registration Information:
Registration Version Number 1
Registration Date: 2006-03-21
Registrant of the namespace:
DANTE
ATTN: Maurizio Molina
City House
126 - 130 Hills Road
Cambridge CB2 1PQ
United Kingdom
Phone: +44 1223 371340
Contact: Tomaz Kalin
Affiliation: DANTE
City House
126 - 130 Hills Road
Cambridge CB2 1PQ
tomaz.kalin at dante.org.uk
Phone: +386 1 430 3055
Syntactic structure:
The Namespace Specific Strings (NSS) of all URNs assigned by
GEANT will conform to the syntax defined in section 2.2 of
RFC2141, "URN Syntax." [1] In addition, all GEANT URN NSSs will
consist of a left-to-right series of tokens delimited by
colons. The left-to-right sequence of colon-delimited tokens
corresponds to descending nodes in a tree. To the right of the
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lowest naming authority node there may be zero, one or more
levels of hierarchical naming nodes terminating in a rightmost
leaf node. See the section entitled "Identifier assignment"
below for more on the semantics of NSSs. This syntax
convention is captured in the following normative ABNF rules
for GEANT NSSs (see RFC2234): [2]
GEANT-NSS = 1*(subStChar) 0*(":" 1*(subStChar))
subStChar = trans / "%" HEXDIG HEXDIG
trans = ALPHA / DIGIT / other / reserved
other = "(" / ")" / "+" / "," / "-" / "." /
"=" / "@" / ";" / "$" /
"_" / "!" / "*" / "'"
reserved = "%" / "/" / "?" / "#"
The exclusion of the colon from the list of "other" characters
means that the colon can only occur as a delimiter between
string tokens. Note that this ABNF rule set guarantees that
any valid GEANT NSS is also a valid RFC2141 NSS.
Relevant ancillary documentation:
None.
Identifier uniqueness:
It is the responsibility of DANTE to guarantee
uniqueness of the names of immediately subordinate naming
authorities. Each lower-level naming authority in turn
inherits the responsibility of guaranteeing uniqueness of names
in their branch of the naming tree.
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Identifier persistence:
DANTE bears ultimate responsibility for maintaining
the usability of GEANT urns over time. This responsibility may
be delegated to subordinate naming authorities per the
discussion in the section below on identifier assignment. That
section provides a mechanism for the delegation to be revoked
in the case a subordinate naming authority ceases to function.
Identifier assignment:
DANTE will create an initial series of immediately
subordinate naming authorities, and will define a process for
adding to that list of authorities. Each top-level working
group of GEANT will be invited to designate a naming authority
and to suggest one or more candidate names.
Institutions and communities affiliated with GEANT may request,
through their designated GEANT liaison, that they be granted
GEANT-subordinate naming authority status. They may propose
candidate names for that authority. One way for such entities
to guarantee uniqueness of their proposed name is to base it on
a DNS name. That is, if e.g. the German National Research and
Education Network wished to be designated a subordinate naming
authority under GEANT, the institutional GEANT liaison could
propose to DANTE to be delegated control over names beginning
with, "urn:geant:dfn.de." Institutions seeking affiliation
with GEANT should send email to geant-submit at dante.org.uk,
nominating an institutional liaison and providing contact
information for that person.
On at least an annual basis, DANTE will contact the
liaisons or directors of each immediately subordinate naming
authority. If there is no response, or if the respondent
indicates that they wish to relinquish naming authority, the
authority over that branch of the tree reverts to GEANT. This
process will be enforced recursively by each naming authority
on its subordinates. This process guarantees that
responsibility for each branch of the tree will lapse for less
than one year at worst before being reclaimed by a superior
authority.
Lexical equivalence of two GEANT namespace specific strings
(NSSs) is defined below as an exact, case-sensitive string
match. DANTE will assign names of immediately subordinate
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naming authorities in lower case only. This forestalls the
registration of two GEANT-subordinate naming authorities whose
names differ only in case.
Identifier resolution:
DANTE will maintain an index of all GEANT and GEANT
workgroup assigned URNs on its web site,
http://www.dante.net/urn-geant/urn-geant.html.
That index will map URNs to resource identifiers, usually URLs.
GEANT- affiliated naming authorities will specify how to
resolve the URNs they assign if they are resolvable.
Lexical equivalence:
Lexical equivalence of two GEANT namespace specific strings
(NSSs) is defined as an exact, case-sensitive string match.
Conformance with URN syntax:
All GEANT NSSs fully conform to RFC2141 syntax rules for NSSs.
Validation mechanism:
As specified in the "Identifier resolution" section above,
DANTE will maintain an index of all GEANT and GEANT
workgroup assigned URNs on its web site,
http://www.dante.net/urn-geant/urn-geant.html
Presence in that index implies that a given URN is valid.
GEANT-affiliated naming authorities will specify how to validate
the URNs they assign.
Scope:
Global.
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3. Security Considerations
There are no additional security considerations beyond those normally
associated with the use and resolution of URNs in general.
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4. Namespace Considerations
Registration of an NID specific to GEANT is reasonable given the
following considerations:
1. GEANT would like to assign URNs to some very fine-grained objects
This does not seem to be the primary intended use of the XMLORG
namespace (RFC3120) [3], or the more tightly controlled OASIS
namespace (RFC 3121) [4].
2. GEANT seeks naming autonomy. GEANT is not a member of OASIS, so
becoming a subordinate naming authority under the OASIS URN space
is not an option.
3. GEANT will want to assign URNs to non-XML objects as well. That
is another reason that XMLORG may not be an appropriate higher-level
naming authority for GEANT.
Some GEANT-developed schema and namespaces may be good candidates for
inclusion in the XMLORG or possible future "EU" registry. The
fact that such an object might already have a GEANT-assigned URN
shouldn't be a hindrance. Work in progress to update RFC2611 [5]
includes an explicit statement that two or more URNs may point to the
same resource. A resource with a GEANT-assigned
namespace-specific-string would, of course, be given an XMLORG or EU
namespace-specific-string as it enters the XMLORG or "EU" registry.
5. Community Considerations
The assignment and use of identifiers within the namespace are open,
and the related rule is established by DANTE. Registration agencies -
the next level naming authorities will be the European National Research
and Education Networks and the established organizational cross-border
formations.
It is expected that the majority of the NRENs and all GEANT base
activities
make use of the GEANT namespace.
After the establishment of the GEANT namespace the consortium will,
as soon
as practical, establish a resolution service (analogously to other
distributed pan - European services, like EduROAM, PerfSONAR, etc) for
the namespace clients.
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5. IANA Considerations
This document is intended as a formal request to IANA for the
registration of a "GEANT" NID within the IANA registry of URN NIDs.
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References
[1] Moats, R., "URN Syntax", RFC 2141, May 1997.
[2] Crocker, D. and P. Overell, "Augmented BNF for Syntax
Specifications: ABNF", RFC 2234, November 1997.
[3] Best, K. and N. Walsh, "A URN Namespace for XML.org", RFC 3120,
June 2001.
[4] Best, K. and N. Walsh, "A URN Namespace for OASIS", RFC 3121,
June 2001.
[5] Daigle, L., van Gulik, D., Iannella, R. and P. Faltstrom, "URN
Namespace Definition Mechanisms", RFC 3406, October 2002.
[6] GÉANT2 project's website http://www.geant2.net/
[7] DANTE's company website http://www.dante.net/
Authors' Addresses
T. Kalin
c/o DANTE
City House
126 - 130 Hills Road
Cambridge
CB2 1PQ
Unired Kingdom
EMail: tomaz.kalin at dante.org.uk
Maurizio Molina
City House
126 - 130 Hills Road
Cambridge
CB2 1PQ
United Kingdom
EMail: maurizio.molina at dante.org.uk
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