RFC 8254

Uniform Resource Name (URN) Namespace Registration Transition

📅 published October 2017, from ietf

RFC 8254: Uniform Resource Name (URN) Namespace Registration Transition 🎀

Okay bestie, this one is from the IETF, and the authors are J. Klensin and J. Hakala (from The National Library of Finland) 💅 It's a Standards Track doc, ISSN 2070-1721, published in October 2017. It obsoletes RFC 3044 and RFC 3187, which means those two are now Historic 🙈

Abstract ✨

Okay so the original way to register a formal URN namespace needed IETF Consensus, and ngl that was a lot. It scared people off from registering, and that made problems more likely to happen later 😭 RFC 8141 changed the rules to a totally different model that's all about encouraging people to register and publish info for every appropriate namespace 🌈 This doc tidies up the status of some older RFCs and confirms and writes down advice for IANA about certain existing registrations. It also obsoletes RFC 3044 and RFC 3187 and moves them to Historic. Those two describe the ISSN and ISBN namespaces, and they're outdated now because the actual descriptions live in the registration templates 🦋

Status of This Memo ✨

This is an Internet Standards Track document 💜

This doc is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It represents the consensus of the IETF community, got public review, and was approved for publication by the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). If you want more info on Internet Standards, check Section 2 of RFC 7841 🧚

For the current status, any errata, and how to give feedback on this doc, go to https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8254 🔗

Copyright (c) 2017 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved.

This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License. 🌸

Table of Contents 📑

1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
  2.  Obsoleting Older Registration RFCs for ISSNs and ISBNs  . . .   4
    2.1.  ISBN URN Changes  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
    2.2.  ISSN URN Changes  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
  3.  The Older Registration RFC for NBNs . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
  4.  Other Existing URN Registrations and RFCs . . . . . . . . . .   5
  5.  Registration Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
  6.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
  7.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
  8.  References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
    8.1.  Normative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
    8.2.  Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
  Acknowledgements  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
  Contributors  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
  Authors' Addresses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9

1. Introduction 🌷

Okay, history time! 📜 When the URN system was first being built in the late 1990s, the IETF URN Working Group agreed it was important to show that URN syntax could fit existing identifier systems. RFC 2288 [RFC2288] showed it was doable to use International Standard Book Number (ISBN), International Standard Serial Number (ISSN), and Serial Item and Contribution Identifier (SICI) [ANSI-SICI] as URNs. Still, it didn't formally register the matching URN namespaces. Part of the reason was that the process for making criteria for namespace definition documents and registration was still evolving. The IETF later consolidated it into successive Namespace Definition Mechanism documents [RFC2611] [RFC3406] 🧠

Namespaces did eventually get registered for ISBN [RFC3187] and ISSN [RFC3044], plus a pretty big collection of other identifiers, including National Bibliography Number (NBN) [RFC3188]. You can find the full list in the IANA Uniform Resource Names (URN) Namespaces registry [IANA-URN] (see also Section 4) 💖

SICI could get a URN namespace registered at any time, but the SICI standard never really gained broad international acceptance, so no namespace has been defined for it so far 🤷‍♀️

Now the tea ☕ The older registration procedure for URN namespaces [RFC3406] needed IETF Consensus for formal namespaces. That requirement discouraged some registrations and made problems more likely, including squatting (using names without registering them). If names aren't registered in a consistent way, the same name could end up identifying different namespaces with different rules, and that's a whole mess of confusion 😵‍💫 RFC 8141 [RFC8141] has since changed the requirements to a new model that focuses more on encouraging registration of all namespaces that follow the formal namespace syntax, collecting as much info as possible while keeping that goal in mind ✨

So this document does the following:

  • Describes the instructions developed with IANA to adapt selected existing registrations to the new model. Those registration updates are complete for ISBN and ISSN Namespace Identifiers (NIDs) and URN namespaces. 🎀
  • Obsoletes the separate RFCs that specify the namespaces for ISSNs and ISBNs, to remove any ambiguity about the status of new templates and updated registrations. 🧹
  • Provides information about the status of NBNs under the new definitions. 🌈
  • Provides suggestions to IANA about how to handle other existing registrations that this document doesn't explicitly discuss. 💅

2. Obsoleting Older Registration RFCs for ISSNs and ISBNs 🦋

The existing RFCs that describe URN namespaces for ISSNs [RFC3044] and ISBNs [RFC3187] were marked "Historic" at the same time this doc got published. IANA has already submitted and incorporated the new registration templates for those namespaces into the URN Namespaces registry 🙌

Those updated templates reflect not just the new template formats but also real, substantive changes to what the namespaces mean. The big changes are summarized in the subsections below 👀

For both the ISSN and ISBN namespaces, URN registration practices are expected to evolve along with the ISO ISBN and ISSN standards, without needing the templates to be resubmitted or any other formal IETF or IANA namespace registration update approval steps. The subsections below clarify the relationship between the original URN namespace registrations for ISBN and ISSN and the recently registered templates that follow the principles of RFC 8141. Approving and registering those new templates made the older ones obsolete 🫶

2.1. ISBN URN Changes 📚

The revised ISBN namespace reflects the latest version of the ISO ISBN standard, ISO 2108:2017 [ISO-ISBN-b]. The namespace lets you use both the old ten-character ISBN numbers described in RFC 3187 and ISO 2108:1992 [ISO-ISBN-a] (formerly known as ISBN-10), and the thirteen-character identifiers introduced in ISO 2108:2005 [ISO-ISBN-c] (formerly known as ISBN-13) 📖

For more details, check out the new ISBN registration template and its associated documentation [ISBN-Template] 🔍

2.2. ISSN URN Changes 🗞️

The updated ISSN namespace reflects the changes between the current ISSN standard [ISO-ISSN] and its predecessor, which RFC 3044 was based on. ISO 3297:2007 introduced the linking ISSN (ISSN-L), which is designated for all media of a serial publication, no matter how many media there are. Traditional ISSN only applies to a single medium, like the printed version of a serial 📰

For more details, check out the new ISSN registration template and its associated documentation [ISSN-Template] 💜

Part 1 ends here! 🧚 Part 2 picks up with Section 3 (The Older Registration RFC for NBNs) and carries on through the rest of the doc, including the references and the Authors' Addresses.

7. Security Considerations ✨

okay so bestie, this part is kinda chill but also important 🫶 some URN namespaces could have security stuff going on, ngl. but this spec is literally just moving a set of namespace registrations to new homes. it doesn't add any security implications of its own 🔒✨ the security notes for each specific namespace are supposed to live in their registration templates, the ones described in RFC 8141. so if you're checking a namespace, go read its template 💅

8. References

8.1. Normative References

Here's the must-read list 📚

[RFC8141]  Saint-Andre, P. and J. Klensin, "Uniform Resource Names
           (URNs)", RFC 8141, DOI 10.17487/RFC8141, April 2017,
           <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8141>.

8.2. Informative References

And these are the extra reads, the background tea ☕🌸

[ANSI-SICI]
           ANSI/NISO, "Serial Item and Contribution Identifier
           (SICI)", ANSI/NISO Z39.56-1996 (Version 2), August 1996.

[IANA-URN] IANA, "Uniform Resource Names (URN) Namespaces",
           <http://www.iana.org/assignments/urn-namespaces>.

[ISBN-Template]
           ISBN International Agency, "Namespace Registration for
           International Standard Book Number (ISBN) ISO 2108:2017",
           June 2017,
           <https://www.iana.org/assignments/urn-formal/isbn>.

[ISO-ISBN-a]
           ISO, "Information and documentation - International
           Standard Book Number (ISBN)", ISO 2108:1992, 1992.

[ISO-ISBN-b]
           ISO, "Information and documentation - International
           Standard Book Number (ISBN)", ISO 2108:2017, 2017.

[ISO-ISBN-c]
           ISO, "Information and documentation - International
           Standard Book Number (ISBN)", ISO 2108:2005, 2005.

[ISO-ISSN] ISO, "Information and documentation - International
           Standard Serial Number (ISSN)", ISO 3297:2007, 2007.

[ISSN-Template]
           ISSN International Centre, "Namespace Registration for
           International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) and Linking
           ISSN (ISSN-L) based on ISO 3297:2007", June 2017,
           <https://www.iana.org/assignments/urn-formal/issn>.

[RFC2141]  Moats, R., "URN Syntax", RFC 2141, DOI 10.17487/RFC2141,
           May 1997, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2141>.

[RFC2288]  Lynch, C., Preston, C., and R. Daniel, "Using Existing
           Bibliographic Identifiers as Uniform Resource Names",
           RFC 2288, DOI 10.17487/RFC2288, February 1998,
           <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2288>.

[RFC2611]  Daigle, L., van Gulik, D., Iannella, R., and P. Faltstrom,
           "URN Namespace Definition Mechanisms", BCP 33, RFC 2611,
           DOI 10.17487/RFC2611, June 1999,
           <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2611>.

[RFC3044]  Rozenfeld, S., "Using The ISSN (International Serial
           Standard Number) as URN (Uniform Resource Names) within an
           ISSN-URN Namespace", RFC 3044, DOI 10.17487/RFC3044,
           January 2001, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3044>.

[RFC3187]  Hakala, J. and H. Walravens, "Using International Standard
           Book Numbers as Uniform Resource Names", RFC 3187,
           DOI 10.17487/RFC3187, October 2001,
           <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3187>.

[RFC3188]  Hakala, J., "Using National Bibliography Numbers as
           Uniform Resource Names", RFC 3188, DOI 10.17487/RFC3188,
           October 2001, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3188>.

[RFC3406]  Daigle, L., van Gulik, D., Iannella, R., and P. Faltstrom,
           "Uniform Resource Names (URN) Namespace Definition
           Mechanisms", RFC 3406, DOI 10.17487/RFC3406, October 2002,
           <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3406>.

Acknowledgements

this doc is basically built on a LOT of group chats 💬🫶 it pulls from the IETF URNbis Working Group discussions in Q2 and Q3 of 2013, especially at IETF 87 in August 2013, plus informal chats at the ISO TC 46 plenary in June 2013. huge thank-yous to everyone who showed up for those ✨

it also borrows from the Internet-Drafts that were written to update the older registrations, back before the new extended template model took over. those were written by Pierre Godefroy, Juha Hakala, Alfred Hoenes, and Maarit Huttunen 🌸

the current spec is way better because of Peter Saint-Andre, who gave it a careful read and suggested editorial fixes 👑 Stella Griffiths from the ISBN International Agency did tons of work to sharpen the ISBN discussion and build the template 💜 and Gaelle Bequet, Pierre Godefroy, and Clement Oury from the ISSN International Centre did the same kind of polishing for the ISSN bits 🎀

Contributors

Alfred Hoenes was the editor and co-author of two of the documents this one partly comes from, and honestly this doc would not exist without him 🫶🌈

Authors' Addresses

John C. Klensin
1770 Massachusetts Ave, Ste 322
Cambridge, MA  02140
United States of America

Phone: +1 617 245 1457
Email: john-ietf@jck.com


Juha Hakala
The National Library of Finland
P.O. Box 15, Helsinki University
Helsinki, MA  FIN-00014
Finland

Email: juha.hakala@helsinki.fi

and that's the whole spec, periodt 💖✨

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