[DFDL-WG] new action item needed: DFDL URN specification

[Mike Beckerle]

I wanted to add to this discussion the w3c blog page that highlights the
problem of the http-based naming scheme. There are many articles about
this, this is just one of them.

*http://www.w3.org/blog/systeam/2008/02/08/w3c_s_excessive_dtd_traffic/
*
On Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 10:35 AM, Mike Beckerle <mbeckerle.dfdl at gmail.com>wrote:

>
> Introduction:
>
> Using URLs as identifiers has caused no end of problems. E.g., in DFDL we
> have http://www.ogf.org/dfdl/dfdl-1.0/ as an identifier. W3C has
> http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema and others.
>
> W3C has badly regretted establishing this convention, as they have farms
> of servers that do nothing but quickly return 404 errors to save
> network-aware applications the network-timeout delay that would otherwise
> occur.
>
> There are parties interested in exploiting DFDL who want DFDL schemas to
> NOT contain network URLs because it simply creates a concern about network
> access whenever a DFDL schema is inspected/used.
>
> Pre-Proposal:
>
> The new way to do this is with URNs which would look roughly like this:
> urn:ogf:dfdl:standard:dfdl-1.0. The whole point is that some other
> mechanism is used to establish correspondences between these and any
> resources in file systems, networks, or built-in to implementations. One
> such mechanism is called XML Catalog.
>
> The point is that it is a name in a managed namespace which cannot be
> confused with a network protocol URL.
>
> OGF is already establishing urn:ogf, and an ogf subgroup has already
> proposed urn:ogf:network for network resources. DFDL schemas aren't network
> resources so we don't want to be a substructure underneath network.
>
> Some other mechanism is used to establish correspondences between these
> and any resources in file systems, networks, or built-in to
> implementations. One such mechanism is called XML Catalog.
>
> Summary:
>
> An action item should be to specify DFDL urn, submit to OGF as a proposed
> namespace, and then produce errata/spec changes to specify its use.
>
> This requires a small design activity to specify a scheme for the
> sub-structure of the DFDL URNs (i.e., scheme for the stuff after
> urn:ogf:dfdl:...) where we want standard identifiers for versions of the
> standard, but we probably also want a few other things (e.g., I would like
> a space for implementations to identify themselves, i.e., an
> implementation-specific sub-area within our URNs.)
>
> Our existing URLs can be compatible (deprecated) practice vs the preferred
> URNs.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Mike Beckerle | OGF DFDL WG Co-Chair
> Tel:  781-330-0412
>
>


-- 
Mike Beckerle | OGF DFDL WG Co-Chair
Tel:  781-330-0412
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