# Re: Internet Draft on URNs

Ed Krol (krol@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu)
Sun, 16 May 1993 09:04:38 -0500

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    Date: Sun, 16 May 1993 09:04:38 -0500

    From: Ed Krol <krol@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>

    Message-Id: <199305161404.AA24830@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>

    To: clw@merit.edu, marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu

    Subject: Re: Internet Draft on URNs

URN's need not be human readable, but they need to be human
recognizable as a particular resource. All of academia revolves
around the easy recognition of reference. A paper may have
footnotes to a lot of things, 90% of the time those pointers
are not followed. The reason is that the reader recognizes
the paper and is familiar with it hence doesn't need to
expand it. The reason we have the domain name system is that
people cant remember and recognize 198.41.0.5. They can
remember internic.net.

In the same manner I think that by making the URN a bit larger
than required by information theory we can make it meaningful
via inspection. For example, one could say the the URN for
the Vint Cerf article in Scientific American last year could
be its ISSN and the ordinal of the article in the magazine.
So 1-56592-025-2.4 or something would be its URN, not very
appetizing. On the other hand you could have something like
cerf.sciamer.1992.4.4. (This made up example was author,
magazine abbreviation, year, month, ordinal). A bit bigger
to impart some instant information, but still unique.

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