# Re: Grainularity of URN

Peter Deutsch (peterd@bunyip.com)
Sun, 23 May 1993 16:57:36 -0400

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    Message-Id: <9305232057.AA02515@expresso.bunyip.com>

    From: Peter Deutsch <peterd@bunyip.com>

    Date: Sun, 23 May 1993 16:57:36 -0400

    In-Reply-To: Larry Masinter's message as of May 22, 18:12

    To: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>, aronsson@lysator.liu.se

    Subject: Re:  Grainularity of URN

[ You wrote: ]

> > Say that I have registered the URN prefix "runeberg" with IANA
>
> This is a quibble, but this isn't really practical. I don't think we
> want to have individuals weild URN prefixes, but rather, save them for
> systems that are universally used, e.g.,
>
> URN:message-id:93May22.165036pdt.2746@golden.parc.xerox.com
> URN:ISBN:4-7890-0372-8

Well, yes and no. I agree that we should seek to avoid an
explosion of top level naming authorities, and we
certainly shouldn't all seek to be our own authority, but
I see nothing wrong with having a distributed name space,
which allows the delegation of authority a la DNS.

Thus, you might find something like

URN:ISOC/europe:user=4321102:12032:::

This would translate as an Internet Society user ID, which
was granted by their european server. I just made this up
on the spot, so don't worry about specific syntax, but I
think the idea of having distributed authorities will be
important as we continue to run the "numbers connected"
counter off the scale.

- peterd

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