URN for Country-Specific Emergency Services
draft-ietf-ecrit-country-emg-urn-03

Wikipedia being what it is, if you use it as a reference you should also
provide the date of the reference. But I am surprised that established
emergency services that motivate this work don't have their wn stable
URLs that you can reference.

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I don't agree with Sean that this document should attempt to list all
known emergency service categories since there is a mechanisms for new
ones to be added as requested. Of course, if you were to list them all
then adding Cave Rescue would be on my list.

However, I do worry that this schema negelects the call hierarchy that
varies by national authority (and sometimes by regional authority). In
the UK the Coast Guard can be called direct, but cave Rescue must be
invoked via the police, yet both use the same emergency telephone 
number. In some countries, Cave Rescue has a dedicated phone number.

It strikes me that "police" is a very loose category in many states 
where there are multiple disjoint police services that have different
jurisdictions and call-out mechanisms (not to mention control
mechanisms).

Anyway, I've not been following this work closely enough to know whether
this sort of categorisation really matters.

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   urn:service:sos.gas  The 'gas' service allows the reporting of
      natural gas (and other flammable gas) leaks or other natural gas
      emergencies.

Why only "natural gas"? Would they not attend a leak of man-made gas?

The abstract really threw me, as did the consistent repetition of the "in one country only" mantra.  May I suggest a couple of editorial changes that I think will fix that?

Abstract:
NEW
   Section 4.2 of RFC 5031 allows the registration of service URNs with
   the 'sos' service type only for emergency services "that are offered
   widely and in different countries".  This document updates those
   instructions in RFC 5031 to allow such registrations when, at the
   time of registration, those services are offered in one country only.
END

Then, I agree with Pete that Section 4 is redundant, but I also think Section 3 is redundant.  All of this is said in Section 1, and doesn't need to be repeated.  I suggest removing both sections 3 and 4.  I also strongly agree that it's a bad idea to copy the text from 5031, and think removing Section 5.2 is correct.  Then this document describes the change to 5031 in the Introduction, and then has the explicit new text in Section 5 (which should become Section 3).  If anyone wants to see what it used to say, they can readily look at 5031.

This is nothing I'm going to make a big stink about, but I think it would greatly improve the document to do the following:


1:

- Editorial: Change the first paragraph to:
NEW
   The policy for registration of sub-services of the service URN with
   the 'sos' service type is defined in section 4.2 of RFC 5031
   [RFC5031] as follows:

Then change the table to simply an indented quote.

Strike section 4. It's completely redundant. (Meaning you can also strike section 2.)

Strike section 5.2. It could accidentally confuse people because they are looking at the wrong section.

Section 5.3: I suggest simply stating that you are replacing the second paragraph of section 4.2 and not re-including the registrations. 5031 is still going to exist, and people will still have to refer to it, so there's nothing to be gained by completely replacing 4.2. Leave the registry pointing to 5031. That also doesn't require IANA to make a change.

Editorial:

   The expert review should only approve services that have emergency
   nature, that...
   
That's not grammatical. Also, the actor is called the "designated expert". Instead:
NEW
   The designated expert should only approve sub-services that are
   emergency services, that...

0) Where's hazmat fall?

1) Should there be a mine rescue service?  If I'm in a mine, I'd sure like to have one (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Copiapó_mining_accident).  Actually any reason you didn't collect all the SAR-type (search and rescue) services under sar?:

sos.sar.m* where m* is mountain, marine, mine?

1) Does fire cover both urban fire services as well an rural fire services (e.g., wildfires in mountains)?

2) Should "gas" be generalized to "utility"?  Power lines being down, power being out, and water mains spewing water when it's freezing can be bad too.  So it could be:

sos.utility.gas
sos.utility.electric
sos.utility.water

Not sure if phone requires an immediate response but I could see some non-SIP people thinking it does:

sos.utility.phone

3) Should there be one for social services?

4) We also need sos.cat to make sure more cats that want to get on the internet don't get stuck up trees ;)

I think that SOS is supposed to be capitalized. If any organization owns the definition of SOS it is the ITU for historical reasons, and they certainly think that it is capitalized.

I wonder about the merits of a list given that by definition it is a partial list.