[urn] Re: Request to register urn:glue

Hi Michael,

I understand your frustration at this late intervention, and it is
regrettable that the review was not solicited much earlier in the life of
the development of the GLUE proposal.  When there isn't an active working
group, it can be hard to ensure that this kind of cross-working group
review occurs.  Despite the timing, however, the concerns Dale and others
have raised are significant.  If you review RFC 8141, will you see that a
core principle is that the combination of NID and NSS must result in an
identifier that is globally unique:

   The NSS is a string, unique within a URN namespace, that is assigned
   and managed in a consistent way and that conforms to the definition
   of the relevant URN namespace.  The combination of the NID (unique
   across the entire "urn" scheme) and the NSS (unique within the URN
   namespace) ensures that the resulting URN is globally unique.

Historically, that assurance has been derived from the registrant of the
NID being the authority which issues the namespace specific strings
associated with that NID.  In any proposal where that is not the case,
there is a risk that the actual issuing authority's approach to uniqueness
may change over time, resulting in a combination that does not meet the
goals of a URN.

In your proposal, the registration of "GLUE Authority Identifier URN"s is
meant to replace the normal relationship between the NID registrant and NSS
by providing for registration of external authorities, who the designated
experts believe will behave in a way consistent with the URN guidelines.
 The guidelines in the document do not contain advice to the experts on how
to evaluate that, nor does it contain any guidelines on how to invalidate a
GLUE Authority Identifier if the authority ceases to issue identifiers that
would conform (imagine for a moment that Dun and Bradstreet decided to
reuse DUNS numbers after the original entity had been defunct for 50
years--this would be rational for some use cases, but would invalidate
their use as URNs).

In a lot of ways your proposal echos the approach taken by the DOI
foundation (see http://www.doi.org/registration_agencies.htm for a list of
their registration agencies).  That suggests to me that one way forward
here might be to shift this registration from a URN NID registration to a
URI scheme registration, which would parallel how the DOI foundation moved
forward when faced with similar concerns.  You can see the details of their
scheme registration here:  https://www.doi.org/resources/DOI_URI_Scheme.pdf.

The change in your document would be to shift from urn:glue to glue: as the
start of the identifier; you could otherwise maintain the same syntax and
the same approach to registering subsidiary GLUE Authority Identifiers.
The difference would be that the document would need to describe how the
glue URI achieved uniqueness and over what scope, but it could echo those
statements from the URN documents which matched your intent.

Just a suggestion, of course, but it does seem to me like the quickest way
to move forward, even if it does mean a trip back to the working group to
approve the change and a review by the URI scheme registration list and
designated experts.  I am not one of the designated experts, but I am on
that list and I believe that with a pointer to the doi scheme registration
and an explanation of the issue that this could move forward as a URI
scheme.

regards,

Ted Hardie

On Fri, Mar 27, 2026 at 2:54 PM Michael Jones <[email protected]>
wrote:

> Hi Dale,
>
> Thanks for letting me the know the status of this application, Dale.  The
> whole point of the GLUE draft is to "incorporate ... identifiers controlled
> by other organizations" into the URN namespace.  This enables URNs to be
> used in protocols to refer to organizations, whether the identifiers
> controlled by other organizations already have a URN representation or
> not.  That's exactly why the working group took on this work.
>
> This isn't academic.  There's intent to use it in multiple independent use
> cases.  For instance, ISO/IEC 6523 identifiers were included in the GLUE
> URN space because of a desire to use it for Swedish government use cases,
> per https://github.com/ietf-wg-spice/draft-ietf-spice-glue-id/issues/51.
> GLUE was originally motivated by cross-border trade use cases.
>
> Indeed, the description of URNs in
> https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8141#section-6.3 seems to anticipate
> uses of URNs incorporating identifiers from other standards:
>    The IETF recognizes that situations will arise in which URN
>    namespaces will be created to either embed existing and established
>    standards, particularly identifier standards
> That's exactly what GLUE does - so that URNs can be used for those
> namespaces that previously were not represented as URNs.
>
> This is an aside, but the parts of GLUE that one could reasonably say are
> unnecessary are where URNs already exist for the identifiers.  LEI URNs are
> such a case, per
> https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-spice-glue-id-08.html#name-lei-urns.
> The authors could consider dropping registrations of the arguably
> unnecessary duplicative GLUE URNs if that would address the Designated
> Expert's concerns.
>
> Having every organizational identifier from any source be referenceable as
> a URN is the point.  Please let's get that done.
>
> This note is written in the spirit of
> https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8141#section-6.2:
>    Because naming can be difficult and contentious, URN namespace
>    registrants and the Designated Experts are strongly encouraged to
>    work together in a spirit of good faith and mutual understanding to
>    achieve rough consensus (see [RFC7282]) on handling registration
>    requests.
>
> Please work with us to meet the need for URNs to be usable to refer to
> organizational identifiers from any source.
>
>                                 Thank you,
>                                 -- Mike
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dale R. Worley <[email protected]>
> Sent: Thursday, March 26, 2026 6:58 PM
> To: Michael Jones <[email protected]>
> Cc: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected];
> [email protected]; [email protected]
> Subject: Re: [urn] Request to register urn:glue
>
> Michael Jones <[email protected]> writes:
> > Touching base on this.  The authors addressed the review comments from
> > the designated experts.  The spec has completed working group, IETF,
> > and IESG review.  Publication as an RFC is currently blocked until the
> > state changes to "IANA OK".  Can one of you please approve the
> > registration so it changes to "IANA OK"?
>
> Currently the URN expert group is running into the problem that we
> disagree with -- or at least, have unresolved concerns with -- the
> *concept* of the GLUE namespace, specifically, that it incorporates a
> number of identifiers controlled by other organizations.
>
> The more generalized discussion is in the thread
>
> https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/urn/?gbt=1&index=KjzL-lRp3zCYw51AATq993ifAmo
>
> Dale
>
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