RFC 5165

RFC 5165 💖 A Uniform Resource Name (URN) Namespace for the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)

okay bestie, this is RFC 5165 🎀 It's from the Network Working Group, written by C. Reed of the Open Geospatial Consortium, and it's dated April 2008. The category is Informational, so it's sharing info, not a standard. The original header doesn't list any RFCs it obsoletes or updates, so there's nothing to report there ✨

Status of This Memo

This memo gives info to the Internet community. It does NOT specify an Internet standard of any kind 🦋 Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

Abstract

This doc describes a Uniform Resource Name (URN) namespace that the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) engineered for naming persistent resources it publishes. The formal Namespace IDentifier (NID) is ogc 🌈

1. Introduction ✨

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is a voluntary consensus standards organization 🫶 It was founded in 1994 and makes lots of technical docs, like standards, working drafts, technical reports, discussion papers, and XML schemas. The OGC wants to give these resources persistent, location-independent Identifiers. Also, a bunch of OGC standards and application schemas are already used and/or referenced by standards from other orgs, including OASIS, the IETF, IEEE, ISO, and OMA. Main character energy 👑

The OGC's core mission is to develop spatial interface and encoding specifications that are openly available and royalty free 💅 Products and services that follow OGC interface specs let people freely exchange and process spatial info across networks, computing platforms, and products. Interoperability in that world works better with a system of persistent identifiers that are global in scope. The OGC is the only standards org whose mission is focused specifically on interfaces and encodings for geospatial content and services 🌸

So the OGC wants to assign formal URNs to published resources, giving them persistent, location-independent identifiers 🍓 The process for registering a namespace identifier is documented in RFC 3406 [2].

The official IANA registry of URN namespaces lives online here: <http://www.iana.org/assignments/urn-namespaces> 🔥

2. URN Specification for "ogc" NID 💜

Here's the official spec, bestie 📝

Namespace ID:

ogc

Registration Information:

Registration Version Number: 1 Registration Date: 2007-08-16

Declared registrant of the namespace:

Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (Headquarters) 35 Main Street, Suite 5 Wayland, MA 01778-5037, USA c/o Carl Reed (creed@opengeospatial.org)

Declaration of syntactic structure:

The Namespace Specific String (NSS) of all URNs that use the "ogc" NID will have this structure:

urn:ogc:{OGCresource}:{ResourceSpecificString}

Here the "OGCresource" is a US-ASCII string that follows the URN syntax requirements [1] and defines a specific class of resource type. Each resource type has its own labeling scheme, which is covered by "ResourceSpecificString", and that also has to follow the naming requirements of [1]. The one exception is that the character ":" shall not be used as part of the "OGCresource" string, to avoid possible confusion 🙈 Also, "OGCresource" is case sensitive, so watch your capitals!

The OGC keeps a naming authority, the OGC Naming Authority (ONA), which manages the assignment of "OGCresources" and the specific registration values for each resource class 💖

Relevant ancillary documentation:

The ONA gives info on the registered resources and their registrations. More about ONA, the registration activities, and the procedures to follow is at:

https://portal.opengeospatial.org/wiki/twiki/bin/view/
Member/OGCUrnIntro

There's an operational OGC URN "resolver" at http://urn.opengis.net/. It keeps a registry of the currently member-approved OGC URNs used in currently approved and implemented OGC standards ✨

The OGC Naming Authority is a permanent OGC resource. The docs and related OGC URN resources, like the URN resolver, have stable URLs. The ONA reference is http://www.opengeospatial.org/ogcna 🌈

There are a bunch of OGC Best Practice and Standards docs that set member agreements on the definitions for "OGCresource" and ResourceSpecificString 🧚

Identifier uniqueness considerations:

The ONA manages resources using the "ogc" NID and is the authority for managing the resources and the strings tied to them. In its procedures, the ONA will ensure the uniqueness of the strings themselves, or shall permit secondary responsibility for the management of well-defined sub-trees 🦋

The OGC may allow experimental type values that won't be registered. So multiple users might end up using the same value for different uses. Since experimental usage is only meant for testing, this shouldn't be a real issue 😭

Identifier persistence considerations:

The OGC has clear docs on a number of the registered uses of the "ogc" NID. Any additional uses the OGC membership develops in the future will be approved first by the ONA, and then by the entire OGC voting membership. This is the normal process for all OGC docs that become OGC standards or other permanent resources for the community 💅

The OGC Naming Authority keeps a permanent registry of approved uses. It's structured so that each "OGCresource" has its own description and registration table 🌸

The ONA publishes and maintains the registration tables and info on the OGC website 🫶

Process of identifier assignment:

The ONA uses the approved OGC standards policies and procedures for discussion, approval, and registration of each type of resource it maintains [3] 🔥

Each such resource may have three types of registration activities:

1. Registered values associated with OGC specs or services
2. Registration of values or sub-trees to other entities
3. Name models for use in experimental purposes

Process for identifier resolution:

The namespace isn't listed with a Resolution Discovery System (RDS). This isn't relevant 🙈

Rules for Lexical Equivalence:

No special considerations, except as noted in the declaration of syntactic structure. The rules for lexical equivalence of [1] apply 🍓

Conformance with URN Syntax:

No special considerations ✨

Validation mechanism:

None specified. URN assignment is handled by procedures implemented to support ONA activities 💜

Scope:

Global 🌍

3. Examples 🌈

These are representative URNs that the ONA has assigned 🎀

urn:ogc:specification:gml:doc-is(02-023r4):3.0.0

This defines the URN used to identify version 3.0.0 of an OGC specification document for the Geography Markup Language in the OGC document archives.

urn:ogc:serviceType:CatalogueService:2.0.2:HTTP

This defines the URN an application uses to specify the service type for an OGC Catalogue service.

urn:ogc:def:crs:EPSG:6.3:26986

This is the URN literal that references the definition of the Coordinate Reference System (CRS) with code 26986, specified in version 6.3 of the EPSG database [4] 🦋

4. Namespace Considerations 💖

Right now there's no available namespace that lets the OGC uniquely specify and access resources, like schemas and registries, that organizations implementing OGC standards need. Other standards orgs, like OASIS and the IETF, also need to access OGC-specific resources 🫶

The geospatial and location services industry will benefit from this namespace by getting more permanent and reliable names for XML namespaces, schema locations, standards document references, and other document artifacts needed to implement an OGC standard 🌸

The OGC members looked at using other existing NIDs, like the ones for OASIS and OMA. But the semantics for geospatial content and services have unique characteristics, like the expression of coordinate reference systems. The URN syntax used by OASIS and OMA doesn't support the elements needed to express the full semantics the geospatial community uses 🔥

5. Community Considerations ✨

Both the traditional geospatial and location services industry and the broader IT community will benefit from this namespace. It gives permanent and reliable names for XML namespaces, schema locations, catalogues registries, and other document artifacts needed to implement an OGC standard 🌈

The OGC wants these resources to be freely and openly available as a set of community resources 🧚 Not only can OGC members identify and submit new proposals for more resources, but any individual or organization can contribute by submitting a proposal to the OGC for the ONA to consider. Normal OGC standards discussion and approval processes will handle any new community contribution 💅

Since 2003, OGC membership has been building expertise in using the OGC URN 🍓 The knowledge and experience from implementation experiments and a variety of operational test beds contributed to the current OGC URN specification. That knowledge is documented in the OGC docs above, and in an operational OGC URN resolver. Work is also underway on a publicly accessible OGC URN registry 🎀 These resources matter for a number of reasons, including the fact that numerous agencies and organizations, like NATO and NGA, have mandated a procurement policy that requires OGC standards and their related OGC URNs 👑

6. Security Considerations 🔐

Okay, serious moment 😭 There's no section 6.3 in the original RFC. Section 6 is just this one paragraph, so there's nothing extra to add here, bestie.

There are no additional security considerations other than those normally associated with the use and resolution of URNs in general 💀

7. IANA Considerations 🦋

This doc defines a URN NID registration of "ogc", which has been entered into the IANA registry located at <http://www.iana.org/assignments/urn-namespaces> 🌸

8. Normative References 📚

[1] Moats, R., "URN Syntax", RFC 2141, May 1997.

[2] Daigle, L., van Gulik, D., Iannella, R., and P. Faltstrom, "Uniform Resource Names (URN) Namespace Definition Mechanisms", BCP 66, RFC 3406, October 2002.

[3] OGC Technical Committee Policies and Procedures, Version 3, October 1, 2007. Available (online): https://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=12586

[4] "Definition identifier URNs in OGC namespace" Version 1.1 Arliss Whiteside, An OGC Best Practices, August 2006. Available (online): http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=16339

Author Address 🎀

Carl Reed, PhD Chief Technology Officer Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. 35 Main Street, Suite 5 Wayland, MA 01778-5037, USA

EMail: creed@opengeospatial.org

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Part 1 done ✨ more parts are coming!

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