CURRENT MEETING REPORT Minutes of the Uniform Resource Names BOF (urn) Reported by Sally Hambridge, Intel Corporation Chris Weider chaired the BOF, and asked Larry Masinter to open the session. Larry gave a brief history of the URI Working Group and also listed some caveats about what the group should address and what it should not address. Keith Moore gave a presentation on the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK) meeting from October 30-31, 1995. This meeting was attended by most of the implementors of URN schemes, and was an attempt to reach agreement on what URNs should be. The Knoxville proposal called for a URN to be ÒURN:NA[:LUI],Ó where NA is the Naming Authority and LUI is Local Unique Identifier. The Naming Authority is resolved to records which describe current resolution services for that Naming Authority. The protocol used to resolve the name is independent of the name itself. Subsequent discussion on the mailing list evolved this proposal to ÒURN:NID:NSS,Ó where NID is the Namespace Identifier and NSS is the Namespace Specific String. The Namespace ID governs syntatic interpretation of the Namespace Specific String. The NSS includes the Naming Authority, if available. The NID[+NA] governs location of resolution services. The protocol used to resolve the name is independent of the name itself. This construct allows the incorporation of different name structures. Examples include: o URN:ISBN:914256789x (where 9142 indicates a naming authority) o URN:MID:199512020720@muddcs.cs.hmc.edu (where muddcs.cs.hmc.edu indicates a naming authority) o URN:INET:acme.com:welcome (where acme.com indicates a naming authority) Keith showed a concept diagram for resolution in which he proposed that a URN would fetch a description of the NSS in an NID registry. If a NA exists, the resolution would lookup the NID+NA, identify resolution services, pass the URN to one (or more) and the URN resolution service(s) would return the result. Without a NA, the resolution would look up the NID which would pass the URN to one (or more) resolution service(s) which would return the result. The framework for URNs appears to be compliant with the requirements for URNs in RFC 1737. It provides global scope, persistence, independence, and legacy support. Participating Namespaces must provide global uniqueness and extensibility and may vary in how they provide persistence and scalability. There was intense discussion of this proposal. Bill Arms was hopeful, claiming that there is at least a basis for agreement. Roy Fielding still has a real issue with the URN:, claiming it will not work. We need something firm enough to code to but flexible enough to allow change in the future. Discussion continued to say that the proposal does not force agreement on names or retention (which the UTK group considered out- of-scope), or on to what a URN resolves. Keith reminded the group that we were not a working group and that to be one we needed a Charter, problem statements (what problem are we trying to solve), drafts, a chair, and a running code. Chris Weider said the proposal allows all schemes to work within browsers, and allow widespread deployment. Ron Daniel said the issue of scalable resolution was outside the bounds of naming. He thought we should let people implement and compete. Larry Masinter remarked that the word "authority" was charged, and that it could mean a body which assigns names OR one that was responsible for resolution. Larry also brought up the issues which were in RFC 1737 not mentioned: Lexical Equivalents and Internationalization. Chris W. asked the group if it was better to work on issues or get parties together to work them. Peter Deutsch said it would be nice to focus on what we agreed on for a change. Bill Arms said it would be useful to identify issues but not work on them in this meeting. Chris then declared the meeting finished, and those who wished to work on issues could stay.