Internet Architecture Board J. Gustin Internet Draft A. Goyens Document: draft-gustin-goyens-urn-id-00.txt S.W.I.F.T. Category: Informational December 2001 A URN Namespace for SWIFT's financial standardization Status of this Memo This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with all provisions of Section 10 of RFC 2026 [1]. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet- Drafts. 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." The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html. Abstract This document describes a Uniform Resource Name (URN) namespace that is engineered by S.W.I.F.T. s.c.r.l. for usage within messages standardized by SWIFT. Copyright Notice Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2001). All Rights Reserved. 1. Introduction SWIFT is an industry owned co-operative serving as a message standardization body, supplying secure messaging services and interface software to over 7,000 financial institutions in 192 countries. The goal of this name space is to ensure the stability and uniqueness of the names of various items that are used within the messages exchanged between financial institutions. S.W.I.F.T. is one of the principal standardization bodies for financial messages and services. This standardization process identifies the structure and meaning of messages exchanged for various financial services offered by financial institutions. It is essential that names of items (such as the XML schema describing the message itself) can be used to identify the resource even years after the message has been exchanged. Internet Architecture Board [Page 1]
draft-gustin-goyens-urn-id-00.txt S.W.I.F.T. URN Namespace December 2001 The same resource may exist in multiple physical locations, and thus multiple URL's but only a single URN. 2. Specification Template Namespace ID: "swift" requested. Registration Information: Version 1 Date: 2001-08-01 Declared registrant of the namespace: S.W.I.F.T. s.c.r.l. Avenue Adele 1 B-1310 La Hulpe Belgium Declaration of syntactic structures: The structure of the Namespace Specific String is a flat space <URN chars> [1] which have no knowable structure outside of the context of the SWIFT community internal resolver. Future changes to the assignment methods may allow others to assign sub-spaces of the flat namespace but again, this knowledge is only valid internally and should never be inferred or relied upon externally. Relevant Ancillary Documentation: None Identifier uniqueness considerations: Identifiers are assigned by SWIFT URN Registration that guarantees uniqueness. This is simply achieved by keeping track of already assigned names and comparing all new proposed names to the database ones. If the name already exists a new one has to be proposed. Identifiers Persistence considerations: The assignment process guarantees that names are not reassigned. In any case swift URNs are guaranteed to remain valid for 15 years. Process of identifiers assignment: Names are granted via SWIFT proprietary registration procedures. Internet Architecture Board [Page 2]
draft-gustin-goyens-urn-id-00.txt S.W.I.F.T. URN Namespace December 2001 Process for identifier resolution: swift URNs are resolved via URN resolvers run under SWIFT responsibility. Rules for lexical equivalence: No special consideration. Conformance with URN syntax: No special consideration. Validation Mechanism: None specified. Scope: This namespace is reserved to the global financial community. 3. Examples The following examples are not guaranteed to be real. They are listed for pedagogical reasons only. urn:swift:xsd:epp$mi.i-2.0 urn:swift:type:fin$103 4. Security Considerations Since the URNs in this namespace are opaque there are no additional security considerations other than those normally associated with the use and resolution of URNs in general. It is noted however that attempting to resolve a swift URN through a resolver other than the one provided by SWIFT is error prone. In any case it is not considered authoritative. References [1] Moats, R., "URN Syntax", RFC 2141, May 1997. [2] Daigle, R., Van Gulik, D., Ianella, R., Faltstrom, P., "URN Namespace Definition Mechanisms", RFC 2611, June 1999 Author's Address Jean-Marc Gustin S.W.I.F.T. s.c.r.l. Avenue Adele, 1 B1310 La Hulpe Belgium EMail: jean-marc.gustin@swift.com Internet Architecture Board [Page 3]
draft-gustin-goyens-urn-id-00.txt S.W.I.F.T. URN Namespace December 2001 Andre Goyens S.W.I.F.T. s.c.r.l. Avenue Adele, 1 B1310 La Hulpe Belgium EMail: andre.goyens@swift.com URI: http://www.swift.com Internet Architecture Board [Page 4]
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