Re: corporate URN namespaces

On 1/29/24 1:14 PM, Dale R. Worley wrote:
> Peter Saint-Andre <[email protected]> writes:
>> I'm curious how community participants and expert review team members
>> see the matter.
> 
> Hmmmm...  I'm not so concerned by circumscribed organizations creating
> their own pseudo-URNs for their internal usage.  I am concerned, though,
> about a namespace that's meant to be used to interoperate between
> systems operated by many organizations, but the details of the namespace
> are not made public.  This happens particularly when a trade group
> standardizes a bundle of technology but keeps the details secret.
> "*This* part of the Internet is private to members of the club!"  Even
> in the situation of the Thread Group, where it seems anybody can obtain
> the details, but nobody is allowed to discuss them in public.

To your first point about circumscribed organizations, when I worked at 
Cisco 10+ years ago, engineers on a project I was advising wanted to 
create a namespace "urn:cisco". That would have been convenient for 
them, but no one proposed reasonable governance for the namespace (e.g., 
Cisco has multiple CTO offices for different product lines, so it 
wouldn't have been easy to centralize issuance of URNs, although perhaps 
folks could have used "sub-namespaces"). In the end I believe the 
project decided to use HTTP URIs as XML namespace names, not URNs.

But yes, that kind of thing would have been tucked away in a single 
company's product. I suppose the same is true of what LinkedIn and 
Amazon are doing in the examples I mentioned. We need to ask ourselves 
whether we really care about such things. Perhaps I'm making a mountain 
out of a molehill...

Peter