# Re: Suggest meaning for URN

Tim Berners-Lee (timbl@www3.cern.ch)
Mon, 7 Jun 93 14:47:51 +0100

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    Date: Mon, 7 Jun 93 14:47:51 +0100

    From: Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@www3.cern.ch>

    Message-Id: <9306071347.AA05514@www3.cern.ch>

    To: Peter Deutsch <peterd@bunyip.com>

    Subject: Re: Suggest meaning for URN

Ed: > Are they not just a string which is a permanent symbolic
reference

> to a resource. Period.

Peter: >Yeah!! <clapclapclap>

Ed, you say "symbolic reference". A "reference" can normally be
dereferenced. If it can't, then fair enough but say that it
supports equality but that's it.

If it can, then you have to have an algorithm in mind, which will
almost certainly involved the user knowing a little about the inside
of a URN, to know the first step to dereferencing it.

Th eonly proposals I have heard of which doesn't need this structure
are Peter's, whereby however many documents everyone can write, he
can still buy a bigger disk to index them ;-), and a suggestion of
Robert Acskyn that one could have a large distributed and replicated
set of servers into which one would hash the URN. The last is the
only attempt I have heard of to scale up the dereferencing of opaque
names.

So, Ed, can you dereference a URN?

Tim

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