[Nml-wg] URN urn:ogf:network

[Jeff W. Boote]

On Sep 24, 2008, at 3:45 PM, Jeroen van der Ham wrote:

> Jeff W. Boote wrote:
>> On Sep 24, 2008, at 11:00 AM, Jeroen van der Ham wrote:
>>> Jeff W. Boote wrote:
>>>> Here I disagree 100%. That is like saying that FQDN's should not  
>>>> have any structure or implicit type information etc...
>>>
>>> Ah! So what actually underlies this whole discussion is the issue  
>>> of naming and addressing. Please, take the time to read: http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/ien/ien19.txt
>> Not at all. I think you misunderstand my point. I do not for a  
>> moment want to combine names and addresses. That is a useful and  
>> needed layer of indirection that I want to make use of.
>> From example #1 in that document - the first step is to look up the  
>> name in the phone book. My point is that I don't want a single  
>> phone book because that does not scale well and does not allow each  
>> 'publisher' the ability to control who they share addresses with.  
>> Therefore, the name needs to have enough information to direct you  
>> to the correct phone book. This is not about finding the address  
>> (yet), it is about finding the correct phone book.
>
> Okay, I agree that finding the correct phone book is the next step  
> once you have an identifier. However, unlike FQDNs, we can give the  
> location of the phonebook along with the identifier that we're  
> sending.
> There is no necessity to encode that information in the identifier  
> itself.
>
> Note that this also allows you to have two completely different  
> identifiers, each defined by their own domain, yet pointing to the  
> same thing (and they'll probably have an equality relation to each  
> other as well).

This would in effect be adding that additional level of indirection I  
was trying to avoid. (Where do you find these equality relationships?)

I agree this can work. But, I'm curious what functionality are you  
trying to preserve by 'not' including some structure in the  
identifier? Just the ability of individual entities to define the  
identifiers in their own way? Can you tell me why this is important?

As I said in the previous message, I think this is about making  
appropriate engineering trade-offs. For a global distributed  
directory, I think performance would be better if locally defined  
names were mapped to a global name with this 'context' before using it  
in the distributed system. This method would also preserves local  
names since you only need to convert to the global identifier when  
interacting with the 'global' infrastructure. But, I recognize that  
there may be other constraints on these identifiers in other spaces.  
So, I ask - what are those *engineering* constraints?

jeff