RFC 4926

A URN Namespace for GEANT

📅 published July 2007, from ietf

RFC 4926: A URN Namespace for GEANT 🎀

Okay bestie, this one is from July 2007 and it's an Informational RFC, so it's sharing info, not setting a standard. 💅 It's by T. Kalin and M. Molina, both from DANTE, and it came out of the Network Working Group. The title block doesn't list any RFC that it obsoletes or updates, so it's not replacing or changing anything else. ✨

Status of This Memo 🌸

This memo provides information for the Internet community. It does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

Copyright Notice 🦋

Abstract 💜

This document describes a proposed URN (Uniform Resource Name) namespace that would be managed by DANTE, representing European Research and academic networks, for naming persistent resources defined by GEANT, the Consortium of European Academic and Research Networks, its projects, activities, working groups, and other designated subordinates. 🧚

1. Introduction ✨

Okay so GEANT is the Consortium of European Academic and Research Networks, and it gives super fast, super good quality network connectivity to schools, universities, and research centres all over Europe. 🌈 The whole setup is made of a bunch of National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) plus GEANT, which ties them all together across Europe. The current network is GEANT2 [6], and it's the seventh generation of the pan-European research and education network, following the pan-European multi-gigabit research network GEANT. 🔥 DANTE [7] is a UK-based org that represents the members of the Consortium and runs the GEANT2 Network. 👑

Most of this teamwork happens inside EU-funded projects. The biggest one right now is the GN2 project [6], which started in September 2004 and comes after other successful projects that have been evolving the European Networks for Research and Education for almost two decades. 🫶 The EU and all the European governments are expected to keep supporting these activities and the network evolution in the years to come, because they see a state-of-the-art research network in Europe as being of top strategic importance. ⭐ In this document, the organisation running these projects and the people who benefit from what they make are called the "GEANT community". 💖

The GEANT community makes so many kinds of documents: specifications, working drafts, project reports, schemas, stylesheets, and more. 📚 They want global, distributed, persistent, location-independent names for all of them, and the Uniform Resource Name (URN) flavour of URIs is exactly what meets those needs. 🦋

The GEANT community and other GEANT-affiliated groups would really benefit from a GEANT URN namespace, since it gives them an easy, efficient way to hand out globally unique, persistent identifiers for the things they create. 🍓 GEANT's work serves lots of different communities of interest, so a namespace that's managed to make it easy to create, register, and resolve unique, persistent identifiers would be a huge win for GEANT, its affiliates, and higher education in general. 🎀 The authors did think about fitting these naming needs into existing namespaces, but they concluded that there are so many activities and so many developers that creating a bunch of (possibly uncoordinated) dependencies on other namespaces would be a mess. 🙈

The proposed URN namespace specification is for a formal namespace. 💅

2. Specification Template ✨

Here's the full template, bestie, so everything is in one place. 🧚

Namespace ID:

geant

Registration Information:

Registration Version Number 1

Registration Date: 2006-03-21

Registrant of the namespace:

DANTE
ATTN: Maurizio Molina
City House
126 - 130 Hills Road
Cambridge CB2 1PQ
United Kingdom
Phone: +44 1223 371340

Contact: Tomaz Kalin
Affiliation: DANTE
City House
126 - 130 Hills Road
Cambridge CB2 1PQ

Email: tomaz.kalin@dante.org.uk
Phone: +386 1 430 3055

Syntactic structure:

Okay this part is the grammar, so it's kinda important. 🤓 The Namespace Specific Strings (NSS) of all URNs assigned by GEANT will follow the syntax from section 2.2 of RFC 2141, "URN Syntax" [2]. On top of that, every GEANT URN NSS is a left-to-right series of tokens separated by colons. That sequence of colon-separated tokens lines up with going down the nodes of a tree. To the right of the lowest naming authority node, there can be zero, one, or more levels of hierarchical naming nodes, ending in a rightmost leaf node. 🌳 Check the "Identifier assignment" section below for more on what the NSSs mean. 💖

This is the convention written out as normative ABNF rules for GEANT NSSs (see RFC 4234 [1]):

GEANT-NSS        =   1*(subStChar) 0*(":" 1*(subStChar))

subStChar       =   trans / "%" HEXDIG HEXDIG

trans           =   ALPHA / DIGIT / other / reserved

other           =   "(" / ")" / "+" / "," / "-" / "." /
                    "=" / "@" / ";" / "$" /
                    "_" / "!" / "*" / "'"

reserved        =   "%" / "/" / "?" / "#"

Here's the tea 🍵: leaving the colon out of the "other" characters means a colon can only ever show up as a delimiter between string tokens. ✨ And this ABNF guarantees that any valid GEANT NSS is also a valid RFC 2141 NSS. Iconic. 👑

Relevant ancillary documentation:

None. 🦋

Identifier uniqueness:

DANTE is responsible for guaranteeing uniqueness of the names of its immediately subordinate naming authorities. 🎀 Then each lower-level naming authority inherits that responsibility for guaranteeing uniqueness of names in its own branch of the naming tree. 🌸

Identifier persistence:

DANTE carries the ultimate responsibility for keeping GEANT URNs usable over time. 🫶 That responsibility can be delegated to subordinate naming authorities, which the "Identifier assignment" section covers. 🧚 That same section also gives a mechanism to revoke the delegation if a subordinate naming authority stops functioning. 💔 Protective, a little dramatic, but it's giving responsibility. 💅

5. Community Considerations ✨

okay so this section is all about the vibe of who gets to use the namespace 🫶 the assignment and use of identifiers within the namespace are open, and the rule for it is set by DANTE 💅 the registration agencies (the next level naming authorities) are going to be the European National Research and Education Networks and the established organizational cross-border formations 🌸

it's expected that most of the NRENs and all GEANT base activities will use the GEANT namespace 🎀 literally the whole family is coming to the party 🥹

and once the GEANT namespace is set up, the consortium will, as soon as practical, put together a resolution service for namespace clients 🦋 it's giving the same energy as other pan-European services like EduROAM, PerfSONAR, etc. 🌈

6. IANA Considerations 🧚

IANA has registered the "geant" NID within the IANA registry of URN NIDs 💜 it's officially on the list now, bestie 👑

7. Normative References 📚

[1] Crocker, D. and P. Overell, "Augmented BNF for Syntax Specifications: ABNF", RFC 4234, October 2005. ✨

8. Informative References 🌸

[2] Moats, R., "URN Syntax", RFC 2141, May 1997. 💖
[3] Best, K. and N. Walsh, "A URN Namespace for XML.org", RFC 3120, June 2001. 🍓
[4] Best, K. and N. Walsh, "A URN Namespace for OASIS", RFC 3121, June 2001. 🦋
[5] Daigle, L., van Gulik, D., Iannella, R., and P. Faltstrom, "URN Namespace Definition Mechanisms", BCP 66, RFC 3406, October 2002. 🌈
[6] GEANT2 project's Web site, <http://www.geant2.net/>. 💅
[7] DANTE's company Web site, <http://www.dante.net/>. 🫶

Authors' Addresses 🎀

T. Kalin DANTE City House 126 - 130 Hills Road Cambridge CB2 1PQ United Kingdom

EMail: tomaz.kalin@dante.org.uk

Maurizio Molina DANTE City House 126 - 130 Hills Road Cambridge CB2 1PQ United Kingdom

EMail: maurizio.molina@dante.org.uk

Full Copyright Statement 💜

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Acknowledgement ✨

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📦 where this page comes from

ietf: rfc4926 2007-07
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