[Nsi-wg] Determining the Network of an STP

[Freek Dijkstra]

On 05-07-2012 10:18, Henrik Thostrup Jensen wrote:

>>> How will you make a globally unique STP identifier without putting the
>>> network in it? (and in a way that makes sense please).
>>
>> Here is a globally unique identifier:
>> urn:uuid:66314cd0-c5f2-11e1-9b21-0800200c9a66
>>
>> As the proud owner of this UUID identifier, I hereby certify that I will
>> use it to represent a STP in my home network.
> 
> I said in a way that made sense :-)

You asked how I made a globally unique STP, and the procedure was really
simple:
>> (created by following the first link on Google using `create uuid', and
>> prepending urn:uuid: as per RFC 4122)

I understand there are more ways to create an globally unique
identifier, but to me this makes perfect sense. After all, an identifier
is just that, an identifier: a persistent globally unique name. There is
no need to add any meaning to it. Any meaning should be taken from the
context.

If you feel better if I add some syntactic context, here you are:

<nsi:STP id="urn:uuid:66314cd0-c5f2-11e1-9b21-0800200c9a66">
   <nsi:network idRef="urn:ogf:network:nordunet.net:2011:org"/>
</nsi:STP>

This tells you that the above identifier represent a STP, and in which
network it is located. Does this make more sense to you?

urn:uuid:66314cd0-c5f2-11e1-9b21-0800200c9a66 is not that different from
the identifier "urn:isbn:9780300124873", which you may recognize as a
book identifier. This may give you a bit of context about the publisher
(just like a urn:ogf:network identifier may tell you a bit about the
organisation that assigned the URN), but doesn't tell you everything: it
does not tell you the author or the name of the publisher. That's
information that you need to get from either a lookup service, or the
context.

I propose for NSI to simply add this context in the original request. If
you are more interested in a distributed lookup service, that's also
possible: I recommend to look at a Resolution Discovery System (RDS)
[RFC 2276] such as Dynamic Delegation Discovery System (DDDS) [RFC
3401-3405].

Regards,
Freek