# Re: Internet Draft on URNs

Michael Mealling (ccoprmm@oit.gatech.edu)
Sun, 16 May 93 22:13:00 EDT

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    From: ccoprmm@oit.gatech.edu (Michael Mealling)

    Message-Id: <199305170213.AA09267@oit.gatech.edu>

    Subject: Re: Internet Draft on URNs

    To: krol@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (Ed Krol)

    Date: Sun, 16 May 93 22:13:00 EDT

    In-Reply-To: <199305161404.AA24830@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>; from "Ed Krol" at May 16, 93 9:04 am

(I'm finally situated in my new position here so now I have time to jump
into the fray again! :-)

Ed Krol said this:
>
> 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.

But internic.net itself is a name that doesn't carry any information in it.
You know it's a name for a site on the net in the same way that you
would know a URN is a name for a resource on the net. The metainformation
that you personally know was obtained from someplace else and not from
the name. In your example a footnote is a collection of metainformation plus
probably a URN but not a URN in and of itself.

> 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.

cerf.sciamer.1992.4.4 contains metainformation that isn't needed. It's
nice to have but it can be gotten by other means. Does the ISBN number for
a book contain the authors name? But with the ISBN number you can find
the authors name plus some more info that will give you the citation your
are looking for.

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