Functional Requirements for Uniform Resource Names
RFC 1737
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RFC - Informational
(December 1994; No errata)
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Larry Masinter
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Karen Sollins
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2013-03-02
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Legacy
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RFC 1737 (Informational)
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Network Working Group K. Sollins
Request for Comments: 1737 MIT/LCS
Category: Informational L. Masinter
Xerox Corporation
December 1994
Functional Requirements for Uniform Resource Names
Status of this Memo
This memo provides information for the Internet community. This memo
does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of
this memo is unlimited.
1. Introduction
This document specifies a minimum set of requirements for a kind of
Internet resource identifier known as Uniform Resource Names (URNs).
URNs fit within a larger Internet information architecture, which in
turn is composed of, additionally, Uniform Resource Characteristics
(URCs), and Uniform Resource Locators (URLs). URNs are used for
identification, URCs for including meta-information, and URLs for
locating or finding resources. It is provided as a basis for
evaluating standards for URNs. The discussions of this work have
occurred on the mailing list uri@bunyip.com and at the URI Working
Group sessions of the IETF.
The requirements described here are not necessarily exhaustive; for
example, there are several issues dealing with support for
replication of resources and with security that have been discussed;
however, the problems are not well enough understood at this time to
include specific requirements in those areas here.
Within the general area of distributed object systems design, there
are many concepts and designs that are discussed under the general
topic of "naming". The URN requirements here are for a facility that
addresses a different (and, in general, more stringent) set of needs
than are frequently the domain of general object naming.
The requirements for Uniform Resource Names fit within the overall
architecture of Uniform Resource Identification. In order to build
applications in the most general case, the user must be able to
discover and identify the information, objects, or what we will call
in this architecture resources, on which the application is to
operate. Beyond this statement, the URI architecture does not define
"resource." As the network and interconnectivity grow, the ability
to make use of remote, perhaps independently managed, resources will
Sollins & Masinter [Page 1]
RFC 1737 Requirements for Uniform Resource Names December 1994
become more and more important. This activity of discovering and
utilizing resources can be broken down into those activities where
one of the primary constraints is human utility and facility and
those in which human involvement is small or nonexistent. Human
naming must have such characteristics as being both mnemonic and
short. Humans, in contrast with computers, are good at heuristic
disambiguation and wide variability in structure. In order for
computer and network based systems to support global naming and
access to resources that have perhaps an indeterminate lifetime, the
flexibility and attendant unreliability of human-friendly names
should be translated into a naming infrastructure more appropriate
for the underlying support system. It is this underlying support
system that the Internet Information Infrastructure Architecture
(IIIA) is addressing.
Within the IIIA, several sorts of information about resources are
specified and divided among different sorts of structures, along
functional lines. In order to access information, one must be able
to discover or identify the particular information desired,
determined both how and where it might be used or accessed. The
partitioning of the functionality in this architecture is into
uniform resource names (URN), uniform resource characteristics (URC),
and uniform resource locators (URL). A URN identifies a resource or
unit of information. It may identify, for example, intellectual
content, a particular presentation of intellectual content, or
whatever a name assignment authority determines is a distinctly
namable entity. A URL identifies the location or a container for an
instance of a resource identified by a URN. The resource identified
by a URN may reside in one or more locations at any given time, may
move, or may not be available at all. Of course, not all resources
will move during their lifetimes, and not all resources, although
identifiable and identified by a URN will be instantiated at any
given time. As such a URL is identifying a place where a resource
may reside, or a container, as distinct from the resource itself
identified by the URN. A URC is a set of meta-level information
about a resource. Some examples of such meta-information are: owner,
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