A URN Namespace for GEANT
RFC 4926

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Network Working Group                                           T. Kalin
Request for Comments: 4926                                     M. Molina
Category: Informational                                            DANTE
                                                               July 2007

                       A URN Namespace for GEANT

Status of This Memo

   This memo provides information for the Internet community.  It does
   not specify an Internet standard of any kind.  Distribution of this
   memo is unlimited.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (C) The IETF Trust (2007).

Abstract

   This document describes a proposed URN (Uniform Resource Name)
   namespace that would be managed by DANTE, representing European
   Research and academic networks, for naming persistent resources
   defined by GEANT, the Consortium of European Academic and Research
   Networks, its projects, activities, working groups, and other
   designated subordinates.

Kalin & Molina               Informational                      [Page 1]
RFC 4926               A URN Namespace for GEANT               July 2007

1.  Introduction

   The Consortium of European Academic and Research Networks (GEANT)
   provides high-speed, high-quality network connectivity for education
   institutions, universities, and research centres in Europe.  The
   network infrastructure is composed of several National Research and
   Education Networks (NRENs) and their European-wide interconnection,
   GEANT.  The current network is GEANT2 [6], and is the seventh
   generation of pan-European research and education network, successor
   to the pan-European multi-gigabit research network GEANT.  DANTE [7]
   is a UK-based organization representing the members of the Consortium
   and operating the GEANT2 Network.  This cooperative work is mainly
   done in the framework of EU-funded projects.  The biggest of such
   activities is currently the GN2 project [6], started in September
   2004, that follows other successful ones that have evolved the
   European Networks for Research and Education for almost two decades.
   It is expected that these activities and the network evolution will
   continue to be supported by the European Union and all European
   governments in the years to come, as they view the existence of a
   state-of-the-art network for research in Europe as being of top
   strategic importance.  We will refer to the organization involved in
   these projects and those that benefit from their outcome as the
   "GEANT community".

   The GEANT community produces many kinds of documents: specifications,
   working drafts, project reports, schemas, stylesheets, etc.  The
   community wishes to provide global, distributed, persistent,
   location-independent names for these resources.  The Uniform Resource
   Name (URN) variant of URIs meets these requirements.

   The GEANT community and other GEANT-affiliated groups would benefit
   from the GEANT URN proposal by having an easy, efficient way to
   assign globally unique, persistent identifiers to resources that they
   create.  The nature of GEANT work is that it serves the needs of many
   communities of interest.  A namespace managed so as to facilitate the
   creation, registration, and resolution of unique, persistent
   identifiers would be of great value for GEANT, its affiliates, and
   the higher education community generally.  The possibility of fitting
   the naming needs under existing namespaces has been considered, but
   the conclusion was that the number of activities and the size of the
   developers community is such that creating a lot of (possibly
   uncoordinated) dependencies from other namespaces is undesirable.

   The proposed URN namespace specification is for a formal namespace.

Kalin & Molina               Informational                      [Page 2]
RFC 4926               A URN Namespace for GEANT               July 2007

2.  Specification Template

   Namespace ID:

         geant

   Registration Information:

         Registration Version Number 1

         Registration Date: 2006-03-21

   Registrant of the namespace:

         DANTE
         ATTN: Maurizio Molina
         City House
         126 - 130 Hills Road
         Cambridge CB2 1PQ
         United Kingdom
         Phone: +44 1223 371340

         Contact: Tomaz Kalin
         Affiliation: DANTE
         City House
         126 - 130 Hills Road
         Cambridge CB2 1PQ

         Email: tomaz.kalin@dante.org.uk
         Phone: +386 1 430 3055

   Syntactic structure:

         The Namespace Specific Strings (NSS) of all URNs assigned by
         GEANT will conform to the syntax defined in section 2.2 of RFC
         2141, "URN Syntax" [2].  In addition, all GEANT URN NSSs will
         consist of a left-to-right series of tokens delimited by
         colons.  The left-to-right sequence of colon-delimited tokens
         corresponds to descending nodes in a tree.  To the right of the