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RE: Un-ask the question (was Re: URIs and Names on t

• To: "'Joshua Allen'" <joshuaa@m...>,"'Mike Champion'" <mc@x...>,<xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: RE: Un-ask the question (was Re: URIs and Names on the Web)
• From: "Steven Livingstone" <s.livingstone@b...>
• Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 08:10:33 +0100
• Importance: Normal
• In-reply-to: <4F4182C71C1FDD4BA0937A7EB7B8B4C105DCDDF5@r...>
• Reply-to: <s.livingstone@b...>

One question I did have while reading the 257 mails on this subject was
based on yoour example.
I was thinking, with http, your agent knows that it is to retrieve a
document - simple and easy.

What does it *do* when it finds a URN? (sllightly different slant on the
"how do we define it in the first place discussions").

In your case, it returned URL resources ... I started to think (based on
some other examples in previous emails) that the general case will be to
get a URL for a URN.. In one case the ISBN URN would return a URL
gettable document.

Of course this won't always be the case. What would URN:car do? I would
guess not a lot, but how would we know when it does and doesn't return a
pointer to something physical? ISBN might return a URL, but it also
represents non-url things - i.e. a physical book.

I am working on something just now that is starting to bring up a lot of
questions like this. 
The easy way to go about it is to just say it is an identifier of
something - plain and simple. But I get the feeling they can be a lot
more useful than that.

Cheers,
Steven

-----Original Message-----
From: Joshua Allen [mailto:joshuaa@m...] 
Sent: Monday, July 29, 2002 6:11 AM
To: Mike Champion; xml-dev@l...
Subject: RE:  Un-ask the question (was Re:  URIs and
Names on the Web)


> I fully agree that abstract "resources" and "namespaces" should have
an
> authoritative description on the web.  It just seems a conceptual
muddle

BTW, you can get meaningful information about a non-http URN on the web
today.  For example, Google search for ISBN:1-558-60622-X returns a few
pages.  If people chose to start publishing comments to either Usenet or
web pages about URN:ISBN:1-558-60622-X, you can be sure that they would
be accessible to anyone who chose to query.


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