Issue 11.1.2: URI vs. URN

[Andy Bierman <abierman@cisco.com>]

Here is the text we have on this issue:
  
11.1.2) URI vs. URN

From Juergen Schoenwaelder's email:

I think we should use URNs for identifying namespaces. There is
already a registration mechanisms in place for URN protocol parameters
(RFC 3553).
 
Furthermore, RFC 3688 is worth to read since this provides a basis for
registering schemas for data models (and this document also says that
URNs are the default mechanisms for such registrations and refers to
RFC 3553).

From RFC 3688, sec. 3.2:

  ns -- XML Namespaces [W3C.REC-xml-names] are named by a URI.  They
      have no real, machine-parseable representation.  Thus, the
      registered document will be either the specification or a
      reference to it.  In the case where a URI is not provided by the
      registrant, the IANA will assign a URN of the form
      'urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:<id> which will be the XML Namespace's
      name.

[ ed. -
 So http://ietf.org/netconf/base/1.0 would be encoded as:

 urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:netconf/base/1.0  

(I'm asking ???)
]

   schema -- XML Schemas [W3C.REC-xmlschema-1] are also identified by a
      URI but their contents are machine parseable.  The IANA registered
      document will be the XML Schema file.  The URN the IANA assigns
      can be used as the URI for the schema and is of the form
      'urn:ietf:params:xml:schema:<id>'.

[
 So the schema file associated with the base namespace
 might be identified by:

 urn:ietf:params:xml:schema:netconf/base.1.0.xsd  (?)
]

   rdfschema -- The Resource Description Format (RDF)
      [W3C.CR-rdf-schema] is an XML serialization of a connected graph
      based data model used for metadata expression.  RDF makes use of
      schemas for RDF that express grammars about relationships between
      URIs.  These grammars are identified by URIs.  The URN assigned by
      the IANA can be used as the identifying URI and is of the form
      'urn:ietf:params:xml:rdfschema:<id>'.

[
 This seems very useful for specifying an element in any data model,
 as Juergen has been saying for months.
]


Andy


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