Last Call Review of draft-spinosa-urn-lex-11
review-spinosa-urn-lex-11-opsdir-lc-bradner-2017-09-20-00

his is an OPS-DIR review of A Uniform Resource Name (URN) Namespace for Sources
of Law (LEX) draft-spinosa-urn-lex-11.txt.

The document describes a URN syntax and provides a set of principles relating to
 a resolution service for the URNs.

I do not quite know how to approach this document for an OPD-DIR review since
such reviews primarily focus on any issues that might impact a network operator
or the operator
 of a service and this document mostly consists of the URN syntax and support
 for the syntax.

The document mentions that "the "lex" namespace resolver will be expected to
cope with a wide variety of "dirty" inputs" (section 8.1).  The document
attempts to describe a design of a "flexible and robust" resolver but I expect
that the foibles of the real world will too frequently cause resolution
failures - I do not have any suggestions to make this less likely although it
seems to me that being quite as forgiving in what the resolver tries to deal
with (partial matches, etc.) may not be worth the effort.  It seems to me that
the only way for someone to have a LEX URN to resolve is to get it from a
publisher (since it will be essentially impossible for someone to guess one)
why is it not reasonable to assume the URN is an accurate copy of what the user
received and simply reject it if it does not parse.  (I say that it seems
impossible for someone to guess since the URN hierarchy and components seems so
locally defined.)

So, personally I would recommend removing the fuzzy matching part and thus
simplify operation and reduce operational issues.

Scott