# URN and citations

Karen R. Sollins (sollins@lcs.mit.edu)
Thu, 14 Apr 94 18:29:45 -0400

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    Date: Thu, 14 Apr 94 18:29:45 -0400

    Message-Id: <9404142229.AA11614@zippy.lcs.mit.edu>

    From: "Karen R. Sollins" <sollins@lcs.mit.edu>

    To: M.J.Cox@bradford.ac.uk

    In-Reply-To: Mark Cox's message of Wed, 13 Apr 94 18:17:13 BST <25722.199404131717@discovery.brad.ac.uk>

    Subject: URN and citations

Mark,

I'm not going to include your whole message here but rather just
address the point you are making. The naming authority (for example
publisher of a book) will assign URNs. What algorithm that naming
authority uses for determining whether two resources are "the same"
and therefore should have the same URN or different and therefore
should have different URNs is purely a decision of that particular
naming authority. If the publisher believes that different printings
of a book that have only spelling and typographical corrections are
the same, it will decide that they should have the same URN. If these
"versions" are determined by the guidelines of that naming authority
to be distinct, the naming authority will assign them different URNs.
In fact, there may be several naming authorities assigning names to
the same resources and one may choose to make different printings
distinct and another may not. It is not the business of this
architecture to make policy choices like that but rather allow
flexibility and heterogeneity in how these decisions are made. It is
for exactly this reason that version management, for example, is NOT
in the list of requirements.

Karen

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