A Uniform Resource Name (URN) Namespace for Digital Nation Pakistan (DNP)
draft-sohail-urn-dnp-01
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| Last updated | 2026-08-10 | ||
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draft-sohail-urn-dnp-01
Independent Submission H. Sohail, Ed.
Internet-Draft PDA
Intended status: Informational 10 August 2026
Expires: 11 February 2027
A Uniform Resource Name (URN) Namespace for Digital Nation Pakistan
(DNP)
draft-sohail-urn-dnp-01
Abstract
This document describes a Uniform Resource Name (URN) namespace for
persistent, location-independent identification of normative and
authoritative publications issued under the Digital Nation Pakistan
(DNP) programme by the Pakistan Digital Authority (PDA), a federal
statutory body of the Government of Pakistan established under the
Digital Nation Pakistan Act, 2025. The namespace covers policies,
frameworks, technical standards, reference architectures,
specifications, schemas, application programming interface contracts,
registries and datasets that PDA issues or is statutorily designated
to maintain. This document requests registration of the formal
Namespace Identifier "dnp" in accordance with RFC 8141.
Status of This Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute
working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-
Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
This Internet-Draft will expire on 11 February 2027.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2026 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
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This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/
license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document.
Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights
and restrictions with respect to this document.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.1. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.2. What This Namespace Does Not Cover . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2. URN Namespace Definition and Registration Template . . . . . 4
3. Syntax . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.1. Formal Syntax . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.2. The class Field . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
3.3. The local-id Field . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
3.4. The edition Field and the Work/Edition Distinction . . . 10
3.5. URN-Equivalence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
3.6. r-components, q-components and f-components . . . . . . . 12
3.7. Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
4. Assignment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
4.1. Assignment Authority . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
4.2. Uniqueness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
4.3. Persistence and Non-Reassignment . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
4.4. Institutional Continuity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
5. Security and Privacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
5.1. Absence of Personal Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
5.2. Comparison and Confusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
5.3. Authenticity and Spoofing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
5.4. Resolver Operation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
6. Interoperability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
7. Resolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
8. Additional Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
9. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
10. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
11. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
12. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Changes from draft-sohail-urn-dnp-00 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
1. Introduction
The Pakistan Digital Authority (PDA) is a federal statutory body of
the Government of Pakistan, established under the Digital Nation
Pakistan Act, 2025 [DNPACT]. Its statutory functions include the
specification of national standards for digital public
infrastructure, the coordination of digitalisation across federal and
provincial government entities, and the issuance of the National
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Digital Masterplan and its constituent sectoral plans.
In discharging those functions PDA issues a growing corpus of
normative documents. Instruments in this corpus are cited by federal
and provincial government entities, by regulated private-sector
participants in Pakistan's digital economy, by procurement and audit
processes, by academic and policy researchers, and by international
development partners. Citations to these instruments are expected to
remain resolvable and unambiguous over periods measured in decades.
At present those instruments are cited by HTTP URI. Experience in
Pakistan and elsewhere shows that government HTTP URIs are not
durable at that timescale: they change when hosting arrangements
change, when content management systems are replaced, when
organisational units are renamed or merged, and when domain naming
conventions are revised. Citations in printed statutory instruments,
in signed contracts and in the published academic record cannot be
revised when this happens. The resulting reference decay degrades
the evidentiary value of the corpus.
A URN namespace addresses this by separating the identity of an
instrument from its location. This document defines such a
namespace, specifies the syntax and assignment rules for names within
it, and requests registration of the Namespace Identifier (NID) "dnp"
as a formal URN namespace under [RFC8141].
1.1. Terminology
The terms "URN", "NID", "NSS", "assigned-name", "r-component",
"q-component" and "f-component" are used as defined in [RFC8141].
The following additional terms are used in this document:
instrument: A discrete normative or authoritative publication issued
under the DNP programme, considered as a continuing intellectual
work independent of any particular edition of it.
edition: A specific, fixed and immutable published state of an
instrument, as approved and released on a particular date.
the Register: The authoritative record of names assigned within this
URN namespace, maintained by PDA as described in Section 4.
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and
"OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP
14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all
capitals, as shown here.
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1.2. What This Namespace Does Not Cover
The scope of this namespace is deliberately narrower than the full
range of Government of Pakistan publications. In particular:
* Names in this namespace MUST NOT be assigned to primary
legislation of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Authority over
the authoritative text of Acts of Parliament rests with organs of
the State other than PDA. The "lex" namespace [RFC9676] is the
appropriate vehicle for legal norms and PDA does not seek to
displace it.
* Names in this namespace MUST NOT be assigned to natural persons,
to legal persons, to individual transactions, or to any resource
whose representation contains personal data. See Section 5.
* Operational records, case files, correspondence and internal
working documents of PDA are outside scope. The namespace
identifies published instruments only.
2. URN Namespace Definition and Registration Template
The following registration template conforms to Appendix A of
[RFC8141]. Sections 3 through 6 of this document expand on the
Syntax, Assignment, Security and Privacy, and Resolution entries of
the template and are normative for them.
Namespace Identifier:
dnp
Version:
1
Date:
2026-08-05
Registrant:
Pakistan Digital Authority (PDA)
Government of Pakistan
4th Floor, 5-A Constitution Avenue, Sector F-5/1
Islamabad, Pakistan
Designated contact: Hira Sohail, Director of Partnerships &
Stakeholder Engagement
Email: director-se@pda.gov.pk
Telephone: +92 302 516 1211
Web: https://pda.gov.pk/
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PDA is a federal statutory body established under the Digital
Nation Pakistan Act, 2025 [DNPACT], with statutory responsibility
for national digital standards. PDA is not requesting the fast-
track registration procedure described in Section 6.3 of
[RFC8141]; this registration is submitted under the Expert Review
procedure of Section 6.2.
Purpose:
Names in this namespace identify normative and authoritative
instruments published under the Digital Nation Pakistan programme.
The classes of instrument covered are enumerated in Section 3.2
and include national digital policies, frameworks, technical
standards, reference architectures, specifications, implementation
guidelines, data schemas, application programming interface
contracts, public registries, published datasets and formal
directives issued by PDA.
The primary community of use is the Government of Pakistan,
comprising federal ministries and divisions, provincial
governments and their attached departments and autonomous bodies,
together with the private-sector entities that build on or must
conform to Pakistan's digital public infrastructure. Secondary
communities of use include international standards bodies,
multilateral development institutions with programmes in Pakistan,
comparative policy researchers, the archival and library sector,
and implementers in other jurisdictions who reference Pakistani
specifications when designing interoperable systems.
The Internet community at large benefits in three respects.
First, the corpus is published openly and is of direct interest to
the growing body of practice on digital public infrastructure, in
which Pakistan is an adopter and a contributor; stable citation
makes that corpus usable in the scholarly and technical record.
Second, Pakistani specifications describe interfaces that non-
Pakistani systems interoperate with, so unambiguous identification
of a specific edition of a specification has direct engineering
value beyond Pakistan. Third, government publications are among
the most frequent victims of reference decay, and a managed
namespace with an explicit non-reassignment commitment reduces
that decay for a corpus that would otherwise be cited by ordinary
HTTP URI alone.
This namespace complements rather than duplicates existing
namespaces. The "lex" namespace [RFC9676] identifies legal norms
and is the appropriate identifier system for Pakistani
legislation, which this namespace does not cover. The "iso" and
"ietf" namespaces identify the outputs of those bodies; where a
DNP instrument profiles or adopts such an output it cites it in
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the native namespace rather than reassigning it. Where an
instrument is also assigned a Digital Object Identifier or, in
future, a Pakistani National Bibliography Number, those
assignments coexist with the URN and are recorded as equivalences
in the Register; a single resource bearing more than one
identifier is expressly contemplated by Section 5 of [RFC8141].
Software that can make use of these names includes citation
managers and reference-checking tools; document management and
records systems within government; conformance and procurement
tooling that must assert which edition of a standard a system was
built against; long-term digital preservation systems in the
national archival and library sector; and standards-registry
software operated by PDA. Resolution services are described in
Section 7.
Neither this namespace nor its definition is expected to become a
constituent part of a standard developed in the IETF. The
namespace is expected to be referenced normatively by standards
issued by PDA itself.
Syntax:
See Section 3.
Assignment:
See Section 4.
Security and Privacy:
See Section 5.
Interoperability:
See Section 6.
Resolution:
See Section 7.
Documentation:
This document. A stable specification maintained by PDA is
published at https://standards.dnp.gov.pk/ under the PDA document
nomenclature framework and is kept synchronised with this
registration.
Additional Information:
See Section 8.
Revision Information:
None. This is the initial registration.
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3. Syntax
3.1. Formal Syntax
Names in this namespace conform to the URN syntax of Section 2 of
[RFC8141]. The Namespace Specific String (NSS) is further
constrained as follows, using the Augmented Backus-Naur Form of
[RFC5234]. The rules ALPHA and DIGIT are imported from [RFC5234].
NSS = class ":" local-id [ ":" edition ]
class = 2*24( ALPHA )
local-id = id-start *62( id-char ) id-end
id-start = ALPHA / DIGIT
id-char = ALPHA / DIGIT / "-" / "."
id-end = ALPHA / DIGIT
edition = ver-form / date-form
ver-form = "v" 1*3DIGIT [ "." 1*3DIGIT ]
date-form = 4DIGIT "-" 2DIGIT "-" 2DIGIT
The grammar above defines the set of well-formed names. It is wider
than the set of names PDA assigns: the assignment practice in
Section 3.3 and the canonical form in Section 3.5 are narrower, and a
name presented in a form the grammar admits but PDA would not have
assigned is still well-formed and still URN-equivalent to the
assigned name.
The NSS contains at most two colon characters and consists of exactly
two or three fields. No structure is implied by the colon beyond the
field division defined above; consistent with Section 5 of [RFC8141],
the NSS is to be read as a whole and this section is the sole source
of its internal structure.
Every character permitted by the grammar above is a member of the
"pchar" production of [RFC3986] and requires no percent-encoding.
Names in this namespace therefore never contain percent-encoded
octets. A candidate name containing a percent character is malformed
and MUST be rejected rather than decoded.
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Characters outside the ASCII range MUST NOT appear in names in this
namespace. PDA publishes in Urdu and in English and publishes titles
and descriptive metadata in both; those titles are metadata carried
in the Register and in resolution responses, and are not part of the
identifier. This restriction follows the recommendation in
Section 2.2 of [RFC8141] that URN namespaces avoid non-ASCII
characters unless the nature of the namespace makes them necessary,
and it eliminates a class of homograph confusion described in
Section 5.
3.2. The class Field
The class field states the kind of instrument identified. The
initial set of registered classes is:
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+===============+==================================================+
| class | Kind of instrument |
+===============+==================================================+
| policy | A national digital policy instrument approved |
| | through the applicable governmental process |
+---------------+--------------------------------------------------+
| framework | A structuring instrument that organises a domain |
| | without itself imposing conformance requirements |
+---------------+--------------------------------------------------+
| standard | A technical standard against which conformance |
| | can be asserted and assessed |
+---------------+--------------------------------------------------+
| architecture | A reference architecture |
+---------------+--------------------------------------------------+
| specification | A functional or technical specification for a |
| | system, service or component |
+---------------+--------------------------------------------------+
| guideline | Non-binding implementation guidance |
+---------------+--------------------------------------------------+
| directive | A formal instruction issued by PDA under its |
| | statutory powers |
+---------------+--------------------------------------------------+
| schema | A data schema, vocabulary or code list |
+---------------+--------------------------------------------------+
| api | An application programming interface contract |
+---------------+--------------------------------------------------+
| registry | A public registry maintained by or on behalf of |
| | PDA |
+---------------+--------------------------------------------------+
| dataset | A published dataset |
+---------------+--------------------------------------------------+
| masterplan | The National Digital Masterplan and its |
| | constituent sectoral plans |
+---------------+--------------------------------------------------+
| publication | A report, study or other authoritative |
| | publication not falling within another class |
+---------------+--------------------------------------------------+
Table 1: Initially Registered Classes
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The set of classes is closed at any given time and is extended only
by amendment to the PDA specification referenced in the Documentation
entry of Section 2. A class, once registered, MUST NOT be withdrawn
or redefined; a class that ceases to be used for new assignments is
marked closed in the Register and the names already assigned within
it remain valid. Adding a class does not require revision of this
URN namespace registration, because it does not alter the syntax, the
assignment authority or the persistence commitment. PDA publishes
the current set of classes at the location given in the Documentation
entry.
3.3. The local-id Field
The local-id field carries the identifier already assigned to the
instrument under PDA's internal document nomenclature framework,
transformed to lower case. Where an instrument has no such
identifier, local-id is a mnemonic assigned by PDA at the time of
first publication. In either case local-id is unique within its
class and, once assigned, is never reassigned.
local-id identifies the instrument as a continuing work. It does
not, and is not intended to, encode the subject matter, the issuing
organisational unit, the publication date or the status of the
instrument. Consumers MUST NOT parse local-id for such information;
that information is metadata and is obtained from the Register.
3.4. The edition Field and the Work/Edition Distinction
The optional edition field distinguishes two things that are
deliberately identified separately, and understanding this
distinction is necessary to using the namespace correctly.
A name without an edition field identifies the instrument as a
continuing work: the standard, the policy or the framework as an
institutional object that persists across successive revisions. Such
a name is appropriate where the citing party means "this instrument,
whichever edition is current" -- for example in a statutory
instrument that requires conformance with a named standard as amended
from time to time.
A name with an edition field identifies one fixed, immutable
published state of that instrument. Such a name is appropriate where
the citing party means "this exact text" -- for example in a
conformance assertion, a procurement specification, a signed
contract, or a scholarly citation.
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Both forms are permanent and neither is ever reassigned. The work-
level name continues to identify the same work even after every
edition of it has been superseded, and continues to identify it after
the work is withdrawn from current effect; withdrawal is a change of
status recorded in the Register, not a change of identity. An
edition-level name continues to identify the same fixed text
indefinitely, including after that text has been superseded. Neither
form is ever deleted from the Register.
The two forms are distinct names identifying distinct resources and
are not URN-equivalent to one another. Resolution behaviour for each
form is specified in Section 7.
Two edition forms are provided. The ver-form is used where the
instrument carries an editorial version number, which is the normal
case for standards and specifications. The date-form, expressed as a
calendar date in the Gregorian calendar in the format YYYY-MM-DD, is
used where the instrument is identified by its date of issue rather
than by a version number, which is the normal case for directives and
for datasets published on a recurring cycle. A given instrument uses
one form or the other consistently throughout its life; the form in
use for an instrument is recorded in the Register.
Examples appear in Section 3.7.
3.5. URN-Equivalence
Two names in this namespace are URN-equivalent if they are URN-
equivalent under the procedure in Section 3.1 of [RFC8141] after
additionally applying ASCII case folding to the entire NSS.
That is, in addition to the case-insensitivity of the "urn" scheme
and of the NID that Section 3.1 already provides, the NSS in this
namespace is case-insensitive. The names
urn:dnp:standard:dnp-d.002:v1
urn:dnp:standard:DNP-D.002:v1
URN:DNP:STANDARD:DNP-D.002:V1
are URN-equivalent to one another.
Because names in this namespace never contain percent-encoded octets
(Section 3.1), the percent-encoding provisions of Section 3.1 of
[RFC8141] have no effect here. No further equivalence rules are
defined. In particular, hyphens and full stops within local-id are
significant and are not elided for comparison purposes.
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This rule has the effect only of eliminating false negatives relative
to the base procedure, as required by Section 3.1 of [RFC8141]. It
does not cause any two names to be treated as distinct that the base
procedure treats as URN-equivalent.
PDA assigns names in lower case, and the lower-case form is
canonical. Applications SHOULD present names in the canonical form.
3.6. r-components, q-components and f-components
This namespace defines no r-component semantics. Consistent with the
guidance in Section 2.3.1 of [RFC8141], PDA does not use r-components
and will not do so before their semantics are standardised. A PDA
resolver presented with an r-component MUST ignore it and resolve the
assigned-name.
This namespace defines no q-component semantics of its own. Where a
name resolves to a URI that is a locator, a q-component is handled as
described in Section 2.3.2 of [RFC8141]. PDA resolution does not
require q-component information and MUST NOT be designed to depend on
it.
f-components are interpreted per Section 2.3.3 of [RFC8141], that is,
according to the media type of the retrieved representation. Where
PDA publishes an instrument in HTML, it SHOULD provide stable
fragment identifiers corresponding to the numbered clauses of the
instrument, so that a clause-level citation such as
urn:dnp:standard:dnp-x.001:v2#clause-4.3 is durable. Such fragment
identifiers are a property of the published representation, not of
the namespace, and are not taken into account for URN-equivalence.
3.7. Examples
The following illustrate the syntax. They are not assignments.
urn:dnp:standard:dnp-x.001 -- a nomenclature standard, as a
continuing work
urn:dnp:standard:dnp-x.001:v2 -- the second edition of that
standard, as a fixed text
urn:dnp:architecture:dnp-d.002:v1 -- the first edition of a
reference architecture
urn:dnp:masterplan:ndmp-2026-2035 -- the National Digital
Masterplan as a work
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urn:dnp:masterplan:ndmp-2026-2035:v1 -- its first published
edition
urn:dnp:directive:pda-2026-014:2026-03-11 -- a directive
identified by date of issue
urn:dnp:schema:person-name:v1 -- the first edition of a data
schema
urn:dnp:api:consent:v2 -- the second edition of an API contract
urn:dnp:dataset:connectivity-index:2026-06-30 -- a dataset edition
published on a recurring cycle
4. Assignment
4.1. Assignment Authority
Assignment within this namespace is closed. Names are assigned
solely by PDA, or by an entity acting under a written instrument of
delegation issued by PDA. Assignment is not open to application by
third parties and there is no procedure by which an external party
may request that a name be assigned to a resource of its own.
Delegation is contemplated because instruments within scope may be
issued by federal or provincial entities under PDA's coordinating
mandate. A delegation instrument specifies the classes and the
local-id ranges within which the delegate may assign, and binds the
delegate to the persistence commitment in Section 4.3. Delegations
in force are listed in the Register. A delegation may be withdrawn;
withdrawal has no effect on names already assigned under it, which
remain valid and remain the responsibility of PDA.
4.2. Uniqueness
Uniqueness is enforced by construction. PDA maintains a single
authoritative Register of all assigned names. A name is brought into
existence only by an entry in the Register, and the Register rejects
any entry whose assigned-name is URN-equivalent, under Section 3.5,
to an existing entry. Delegated assignment operates against the same
Register and within non-overlapping allocations, so a delegate cannot
create a collision with PDA or with another delegate.
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The Register records, for each name: the assigned-name; the
instrument or edition identified; the date of assignment; the
assigning entity; the current status; the current authoritative
location or locations of the identified resource; a cryptographic
digest of each edition-level resource as published; titles and
descriptive metadata in English and Urdu; and any equivalent
identifiers in other identifier systems.
4.3. Persistence and Non-Reassignment
A name assigned within this namespace MUST NOT be reassigned to a
different resource, and MUST NOT be withdrawn or deleted, under any
circumstance. This holds where the identified instrument is
superseded, repealed, withdrawn from effect, or found to have been
issued in error; where the organisational unit that issued it is
abolished or merged; and where the instrument is no longer published.
In each case the fact is recorded as a status change in the Register
and the name continues to identify what it has always identified.
An error in an assignment is corrected by recording the error in the
Register and, if necessary, assigning a new name. It is never
corrected by reusing the erroneous name.
4.4. Institutional Continuity
Section 5.1 of [RFC8141] asks that it be clear how a namespace
remains viable if the assigning organisation can no longer maintain
it.
PDA is a body created by primary legislation rather than by
administrative order, and its dissolution or reconstitution would
require an act of the legislature. Pakistani legislative practice on
the reconstitution of statutory bodies provides for the devolution of
the functions, assets and records of a dissolved body upon a
successor or upon the Division concerned. Stewardship of this
namespace and of the Register is a function within the meaning of
that practice, and would devolve accordingly.
PDA additionally undertakes the following, which do not depend on
PDA's continued existence:
* The Register is published in full as a machine-readable open
dataset, refreshed on a regular cycle, so that a complete copy
exists outside PDA's own systems at all times.
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* PDA deposits the Register and the published corpus with Pakistan's
national depository institutions and offers the same deposit to
international web-archiving initiatives, so that the identifier-
to-resource binding survives independently of PDA's
infrastructure.
* If stewardship is transferred, PDA or its successor will submit a
revised registration template under Section 6.2 of [RFC8141]
recording the change. Transfer of stewardship does not affect the
validity of names already assigned.
5. Security and Privacy
5.1. Absence of Personal Data
Names in this namespace are assigned only to published institutional
instruments. A name MUST NOT be assigned to a natural person, to an
identifier of a natural person, to an individual transaction or
record, or to any resource whose representation contains personal
data.
This constraint is stated normatively because PDA's statutory mandate
includes national digital identity and data exchange infrastructure,
and because the persistence properties that make URNs attractive for
institutional documents make them actively harmful for identifiers of
people. A URN cannot be revoked, and the non-reassignment commitment
in Section 4.3 is incompatible with any right of erasure. Extending
this namespace to cover personal or transactional data would require
a new namespace registration with a materially different persistence
model, and PDA does not propose one.
The Register records the names of officers only in their
institutional capacity, as the approving authority for an instrument,
which is information already disclosed on the face of the published
instrument.
5.2. Comparison and Confusion
The case-insensitivity rule in Section 3.5 introduces the general
risks discussed in [RFC6943] for identifiers compared under case
folding. Those risks are bounded here: the NSS is restricted to
ASCII letters, digits, hyphen and full stop, so ASCII case folding is
locale-independent, involves no expansion or contraction of
characters, and admits no Unicode confusables. The Turkish dotless-i
problem does not arise because folding is defined over the ASCII
range only. Implementations MUST perform case folding over the ASCII
range only and MUST NOT apply locale-sensitive case mapping.
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A false positive in comparison could cause a system to treat a
conformance assertion against one instrument as an assertion against
another. Because the identified resources are public and the
Register is published, such an error is detectable by inspection.
Because the work-level and edition-level forms of a name are similar
in appearance but identify different resources (Section 3.4), an
implementation that truncates or elides the edition field will
silently substitute a work-level citation for an edition-level one.
Where the citation appears in a conformance or contractual context
this changes its meaning. Implementations MUST NOT truncate names,
and applications that display names SHOULD display them in full,
consistent with Section 4.4 of [RFC8141].
5.3. Authenticity and Spoofing
A name in this namespace asserts nothing about the authenticity of
any document it may be attached to. A third party can place the
string "urn:dnp:standard:..." on an unauthorised document as easily
as it can place any other string. The Register, retrieved over an
authenticated channel, is the sole authority for what a name
identifies; the cryptographic digests it records for edition-level
resources allow a retrieved document to be checked against the
published text.
Consistent with Section 8 of [RFC8141], the information in this
registration is a declaration and should be treated as advisory.
5.4. Resolver Operation
Where PDA operates a resolution service (Section 7), queries to that
service reveal to PDA which instruments a given client is interested
in, and, absent transport security, reveal the same to network
observers. Because the corpus includes policy and regulatory
instruments, that interest may be sensitive; a pattern of queries
could indicate the direction of an entity's compliance work or of a
researcher's enquiry.
Accordingly the PDA resolver MUST be offered over HTTPS, MUST NOT
require authentication, and MUST NOT require or set cookies. PDA
retains resolver request logs only in aggregate form and only for
capacity planning, and does not disclose individual query records.
Directory harvesting is not a concern for this namespace: the
Register is published in full and complete enumeration of the
namespace is an intended feature rather than an attack.
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6. Interoperability
PDA is aware of the following potential sources of confusion and
addresses each here rather than leaving it to be discovered later.
*The string "DNP".* "DNP" is used as a corporate brand by at least
one substantial commercial enterprise unconnected with Pakistan,
which holds trademark registrations in that string in several
jurisdictions and operates a brand top-level domain under it. "DNP"
is also an established abbreviation in chemistry and in professional
sport. PDA claims no association with any of these, and the
registration of this NID neither asserts nor implies any right in the
string outside the URN namespace registry. PDA has selected the
string because it is the statutory short form of Digital Nation
Pakistan, the programme established by the Act of the same name, and
not for any associative value. PDA notes that a URN NID and a
trademark occupy different registries with different scopes, that no
resource identified in this namespace is a commercial good or
service, and that Section 5.1 of [RFC8141] leaves disputes over
strings to the parties concerned. PDA will engage in good faith with
any objection raised during Expert Review.
*Legal norms.* The boundary with the "lex" namespace [RFC9676] is set
out in Section 1.2. Instruments in this namespace frequently cite
Pakistani legislation; such citations use "lex" or the Gazette
reference, not this namespace. An instrument issued by PDA under a
statutory power is identified here as a directive; the statutory
power itself is not.
*Bibliographic identifiers.* Pakistan has no registered National
Bibliography Number sub-namespace under [RFC8458] at the time of
writing. Should the national library register one and assign numbers
to instruments in this corpus, the resulting names would coexist with
names in this namespace and be recorded as equivalences in the
Register. The same applies to Digital Object Identifiers, which PDA
assigns to some publications through a DOI registration agency.
*Internal document codes.* PDA's internal document nomenclature codes
appear within local-id in transformed form (Section 3.3). Those
codes exist and circulate outside the URN context, and readers may
encounter a code in isolation. A bare code is not a URN and MUST NOT
be treated as one; the transformation from code to local-id is
defined in the PDA specification referenced in the Documentation
entry of Section 2. The transformation is not in general reversible
by inspection and implementations MUST NOT attempt to reverse it
algorithmically.
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*Character handling.* Because names never contain percent-encoded
octets or non-ASCII characters (Section 3.1), the encoding pitfalls
that arise when pre-existing identifier systems are mapped into URN
syntax do not arise here.
*Protocol slots.* Consistent with Section 4.1 of [RFC8141], a name in
this namespace is not a locator and SHOULD NOT be placed in a URI
protocol slot whose defined semantics require dereferencing to a
representation. It is appropriate in citation fields, metadata
records, conformance declarations and provenance assertions.
7. Resolution
Resolution is intended. PDA operates and undertakes to continue to
operate a resolution service for names in this namespace.
The service is offered over HTTPS at the endpoint
https://urn.dnp.gov.pk/, operated by PDA under a Government of
Pakistan domain. A client resolves a name by requesting the
assigned-name as a path component of that endpoint, for example
https://urn.dnp.gov.pk/urn:dnp:standard:dnp-x.001:v2. The endpoint
is also recorded in the PDA specification referenced in the
Documentation entry of Section 2; should it ever change, the
specification and this registration are revised, and names already
assigned are unaffected.
Resolution behaviour follows the work/edition distinction of
Section 3.4:
* A work-level name resolves to the current authoritative edition of
the instrument where one is in force, and otherwise to a record
describing the instrument and its editions.
* An edition-level name resolves to that fixed edition, and
continues to do so after it has been superseded. A superseded
edition remains retrievable and is marked as superseded, with a
reference to the edition that superseded it. PDA does not remove
superseded editions from publication.
A client that requests a representation of the identified resource
receives it, or a redirection to its current location. A client that
requests metadata, by content negotiation, receives the Register
record for the name, including status, provenance, digests and
equivalent identifiers. Resolution of a syntactically valid name
that has not been assigned is distinguishable from resolution of a
name that has been assigned to an instrument that is no longer in
force; the two are different conditions and are reported differently.
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Resolution is a convenience and is not constitutive. A name remains
valid, and continues to identify what the Register says it
identifies, irrespective of whether any resolver is reachable, and
irrespective of whether the identified resource is currently
retrievable.
PDA does not at present operate a registration process for third-
party publicly advertised resolution services for this namespace, and
does not at present recommend any resolver other than its own.
Should PDA establish such a process, the requirements for being
publicly advertised will be published alongside the specification
referenced in the Documentation entry, and this registration will be
revised. Handling of r-components is specified in Section 3.6: PDA
defines none, and its resolver ignores any that are presented.
8. Additional Information
The Digital Nation Pakistan Act, 2025 [DNPACT] establishes PDA and
sets out its functions, including the specification of national
digital standards and the coordination of digitalisation across
government. The Act is the source of PDA's authority to issue the
instruments identified in this namespace and of the institutional
continuity described in Section 4.4.
Registrations by national government bodies in this registry include
those of the Federal Chancellery of the Republic of Austria and of
New Zealand [RFC4350], and by national memory institutions including
the National Archives of Finland. This registration follows the same
pattern: a national public authority seeking durable identification
of a defined corpus of official material, without any claim to a
country-code-derived namespace. PDA notes that Section 5.1 of
[RFC8141] reserves strings of the form ALPHA ALPHA "-" for possible
future country-code-based registration; this registration does not
use, anticipate or depend on any such reservation.
9. IANA Considerations
This document requests that IANA register the formal URN Namespace
Identifier "dnp" in the "Formal URN Namespaces" registry, using the
registration template in Section 2, in accordance with Section 6.2 of
[RFC8141].
This document makes no other request of IANA.
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10. Security Considerations
Security and privacy considerations for this namespace are set out in
Section 5, in accordance with Section 6.4.4 of [RFC8141]. General
security considerations for URN namespaces are given in Section 8 of
[RFC8141].
11. Normative References
[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2119>.
[RFC3986] Berners-Lee, T., Fielding, R., and L. Masinter, "Uniform
Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax", STD 66,
RFC 3986, DOI 10.17487/RFC3986, January 2005,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3986>.
[RFC5234] Crocker, D., Ed. and P. Overell, "Augmented BNF for Syntax
Specifications: ABNF", STD 68, RFC 5234,
DOI 10.17487/RFC5234, January 2008,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5234>.
[RFC8141] Saint-Andre, P. and J. Klensin, "Uniform Resource Names
(URNs)", RFC 8141, DOI 10.17487/RFC8141, April 2017,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8141>.
[RFC8174] Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC
2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC8174,
May 2017, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8174>.
12. Informative References
[RFC4350] Hendrikx, F. and C. Wallis, "A Uniform Resource Name (URN)
Formal Namespace for the New Zealand Government",
RFC 4350, DOI 10.17487/RFC4350, February 2006,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4350>.
[RFC6943] Thaler, D., Ed., "Issues in Identifier Comparison for
Security Purposes", RFC 6943, DOI 10.17487/RFC6943, May
2013, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6943>.
[RFC8458] Hakala, J., "Using National Bibliography Numbers as
Uniform Resource Names", RFC 8458, DOI 10.17487/RFC8458,
October 2018, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8458>.
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[RFC9676] Spinosa, P.L., Francesconi, E., and C. Lupo, "A Uniform
Resource Name (URN) Namespace for Sources of Law (LEX)",
RFC 9676, DOI 10.17487/RFC9676, May 2025,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc9676>.
[DNPACT] Government of Pakistan, "The Digital Nation Pakistan Act,
2025 (Act No. IV of 2025)", The Gazette of Pakistan,
Extraordinary, Part I, 29 January 2025, January 2025,
<https://na.gov.pk/>.
Changes from draft-sohail-urn-dnp-00
The "class" production in Section 3.1 was changed from 2*24( lowalpha
) to 2*24( ALPHA ), and the now-unused "lowalpha" production was
removed. As drafted in -00, the grammar restricted the class field
to lower-case letters while Section 3.5 declared the whole NSS case-
insensitive and gave an all-upper-case name as an example of an
equivalent form. The two provisions were inconsistent, and on the
strict reading the example was not a well-formed name. The change
resolves the inconsistency in favour of the equivalence rule. It
does not alter which names are URN-equivalent to which, and it does
not alter PDA's practice of assigning in lower case. Thanks to Dale
R. Worley for identifying this.
A paragraph was added to Section 3.1 noting that the grammar defines
well-formedness and is deliberately wider than PDA's assignment
practice.
This section is to be removed before any publication.
Author's Address
Hira Sohail (editor)
Pakistan Digital Authority
4th Floor, 5-A Constitution Avenue
Sector F-5/1, Islamabad
Pakistan
Phone: +92 302 516 1211
Email: director-se@pda.gov.pk
URI: https://pda.gov.pk/
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