# Re: OCLC's URN Services Proposal

Paul Hoffman (ietf-lists@proper.com)
Thu, 8 Jun 1995 10:03:31 -0700

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    Message-Id: <v02120c09abfcd27d64be@[165.227.40.38]>

    Date: Thu, 8 Jun 1995 10:03:31 -0700

    To: jul@oclc.org (Erik Jul)

    From: ietf-lists@proper.com (Paul Hoffman)

    Subject: Re: OCLC's URN Services Proposal

>> I fully expect that there will be different, more structured URC styles
>> in the future.
>
>To be fair, we should recognize that many well developed "URC styles"
>currently exist, are broadly deployed, and supported by professional
>communities and standards organizations, if by "URC style" you mean
>methods of recording and communicating what is being called metadata
>(or, as Mr. Hoffman called it, "metatext," being such information as
>"who the author is or when [a book] was published," for example).

I guess I should have said "I fully expect that there will be different,
more structured URC styles *discussed in the URI WG* in the future."

This highlights one of the problems of the OCLC proposal that Stu didn't
address: there is no discussion of the format of what comes back from the
URN (or URI) resolution. Currently, the only choices that have been talked
about here are URLS (RFC 1738) and URC0s, which have only been proposed for
barely more than a month. (Still waiting for Ron's fuller URC I-D to appear
on the mailing list...). I'm sure such well-developed styles currently
exist, but they need to be talked about at least enough to give them a
name, unless you are proposing a non-WG registration mechanism.

>To extend this thought: perhaps a URN could be viewed as a token (to adopt a
>very mechanistic metaphor). ...

I like this metaphor and support where you are going with it, assuming that
the box into which you drop the token is a piece of client software that is
configurable by the user, not the URN resolver itself.

--Paul Hoffman
--Proper Publishing

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