[urn] Request for registration of formal URN namespace "dnp "

URN NAMESPACE REGISTRATION TEMPLATE
Formal Namespace Identifier: dnp
Submitted under Section 6.2 of RFC 8141 (Expert Review)


Namespace Identifier:
   dnp


Version:
   1


Date:
   2026-08-05


Registrant:
   Pakistan Digital Authority (PDA)
   Government of Pakistan
   4th Floor, 5-A Constitution Avenue, Sector F-5/1
   Islamabad, Pakistan

   Designated contact:  Hira Sohail
                        Director of Partnerships & Stakeholder
                        Engagement
   Email:               [email protected]
   Telephone:           +92 302 516 1211
   Web:                 https://pda.gov.pk/

   PDA is a federal statutory body established under the Digital
   Nation Pakistan Act, 2025, with statutory responsibility for
   national digital standards. PDA is not requesting the fast-track
   registration procedure of Section 6.3 of RFC 8141; this
   registration is submitted under the Expert Review procedure of
   Section 6.2.


Purpose:
   Names in this namespace identify normative and authoritative
   instruments published under the Digital Nation Pakistan
   programme: national digital policies, frameworks, technical
   standards, reference architectures, specifications,
   implementation guidelines, data schemas, application programming
   interface contracts, public registries, published datasets, the
   National Digital Masterplan and its sectoral plans, and formal
   directives issued by PDA.

   The primary community of use is the Government of Pakistan --
   federal ministries and divisions, provincial governments and
   their attached departments and autonomous bodies -- together
   with the private-sector entities that build on or must conform
   to Pakistan's digital public infrastructure. Secondary
   communities include international standards bodies, multilateral
   development institutions with programmes in Pakistan,
   comparative policy researchers, the archival and library sector,
   and implementers in other jurisdictions who reference Pakistani
   specifications when designing interoperable systems.

   The Internet community at large benefits in three respects.
   First, the corpus is published openly and is of direct interest
   to the growing body of practice on digital public
   infrastructure, in which Pakistan is both an adopter and a
   contributor; stable citation makes that corpus usable in the
   scholarly and technical record. Second, Pakistani specifications
   describe interfaces with which non-Pakistani systems
   interoperate, so unambiguous identification of a specific
   edition of a specification has engineering value beyond
   Pakistan. Third, government publications are among the most
   frequent victims of reference decay; a managed namespace with an
   explicit non-reassignment commitment reduces that decay for a
   corpus that would otherwise be cited by ordinary HTTP URI alone.

   This namespace complements rather than duplicates existing
   namespaces. The "lex" namespace (RFC 9676) identifies legal
   norms and is the appropriate identifier system for Pakistani
   legislation, which this namespace does not cover. The "iso" and
   "ietf" namespaces identify the outputs of those bodies; where a
   DNP instrument profiles or adopts such an output it cites it in
   the native namespace rather than reassigning it. Where an
   instrument also bears a Digital Object Identifier or, in future,
   a Pakistani National Bibliography Number, those assignments
   coexist with the URN and are recorded as equivalences in the
   Register.

   Software that can make use of these names includes citation
   managers and reference-checking tools; document management and
   records systems within government; conformance and procurement
   tooling that must assert which edition of a standard a system
   was built against; long-term digital preservation systems in the
   national archival and library sector; and standards-registry
   software operated by PDA.

   Resolution services are available and are described under
   Resolution below.

   Neither this namespace nor its definition is expected to become
   a constituent part of a standard developed in the IETF. The
   namespace is expected to be referenced normatively by standards
   issued by PDA itself.


Syntax:
   Names conform to the URN syntax of Section 2 of RFC 8141. The
   Namespace Specific String is further constrained as follows,
   using the ABNF of RFC 5234. ALPHA and DIGIT are imported from
   RFC 5234.

     NSS         = class ":" local-id [ ":" edition ]

     class       = 2*24( lowalpha )

     local-id    = id-start *62( id-char ) id-end
     id-start    = ALPHA / DIGIT
     id-char     = ALPHA / DIGIT / "-" / "."
     id-end      = ALPHA / DIGIT

     edition     = ver-form / date-form
     ver-form    = "v" 1*3DIGIT [ "." 1*3DIGIT ]
     date-form   = 4DIGIT "-" 2DIGIT "-" 2DIGIT

     lowalpha    = %x61-7A     ; a-z

   The NSS contains at most two colon characters and consists of
   exactly two or three fields. No structure is implied by the
   colon beyond that field division.

   class states the kind of instrument. The initially registered
   classes are: policy, framework, standard, architecture,
   specification, guideline, directive, schema, api, registry,
   dataset, masterplan, publication. The set is closed at any given
   time and is extended only by amendment to the PDA specification
   cited under Documentation. A registered class is never withdrawn
   or redefined; a class no longer used for new assignments is
   marked closed and the names already assigned within it remain
   valid.

   local-id carries the identifier already assigned to the
   instrument under PDA's document nomenclature framework,
   transformed to lower case, or a mnemonic assigned by PDA where
   no such identifier exists. It is unique within its class and is
   never reassigned. It does not encode subject matter, issuing
   unit, date or status, and consumers must not parse it for such
   information.

   The optional edition field distinguishes two things that are
   deliberately identified separately. A name without an edition
   field identifies the instrument as a continuing work -- the
   standard or policy as an institutional object persisting across
   revisions -- and is appropriate where the citing party means
   "this instrument, whichever edition is current". A name with an
   edition field identifies one fixed, immutable published state,
   and is appropriate where the citing party means "this exact
   text". Both forms are permanent; neither is ever reassigned; the
   work-level name survives withdrawal of the instrument from
   current effect, withdrawal being a status change rather than a
   change of identity. The two forms are distinct names for
   distinct resources and are not URN-equivalent to one another.
   The ver-form of edition is used where the instrument carries an
   editorial version number; the date-form, a Gregorian calendar
   date as YYYY-MM-DD, where the instrument is identified by date
   of issue. An instrument uses one form consistently throughout
   its life.

   Character handling. Every character permitted by the grammar is
   a member of the "pchar" production of RFC 3986 and requires no
   percent-encoding. Names therefore never contain percent-encoded
   octets; a candidate name containing a percent character is
   malformed and must be rejected rather than decoded. Characters
   outside the ASCII range must not appear. PDA publishes in Urdu
   and English and carries titles in both, but those titles are
   metadata held in the Register, not identifiers.

   URN-equivalence. Two names are URN-equivalent if they are
   URN-equivalent under Section 3.1 of RFC 8141 after additionally
   applying ASCII case folding to the entire NSS. That is, the NSS
   in this namespace is case-insensitive, so that

     urn:dnp:standard:dnp-d.002:v1
     urn:dnp:standard:DNP-D.002:v1
     URN:DNP:STANDARD:DNP-D.002:V1

   are URN-equivalent. Because names never contain percent-encoded
   octets, the percent-encoding provisions of Section 3.1 have no
   effect here. No further equivalence rules are defined; hyphens
   and full stops within local-id are significant and are not
   elided. This rule only eliminates false negatives relative to
   the base procedure and does not cause any two names to be
   treated as distinct that the base procedure treats as
   URN-equivalent. PDA assigns in lower case and the lower-case
   form is canonical.

   Components. This namespace defines no r-component semantics;
   consistent with Section 2.3.1 of RFC 8141, PDA does not use them
   and will not do so before their semantics are standardised. A
   PDA resolver presented with an r-component ignores it and
   resolves the assigned-name. No q-component semantics of its own
   are defined; where a name resolves to a URI that is a locator, a
   q-component is handled per Section 2.3.2, and PDA resolution
   does not depend on q-component information. f-components are
   interpreted per Section 2.3.3, according to the media type of
   the retrieved representation; where PDA publishes an instrument
   in HTML it provides stable fragment identifiers corresponding to
   the numbered clauses, so that a clause-level citation such as
   urn:dnp:standard:dnp-x.001:v2#clause-4.3 is durable.

   Examples (illustrative, not assignments):

     urn:dnp:standard:dnp-x.001
     urn:dnp:standard:dnp-x.001:v2
     urn:dnp:architecture:dnp-d.002:v1
     urn:dnp:masterplan:ndmp-2026-2035
     urn:dnp:masterplan:ndmp-2026-2035:v1
     urn:dnp:directive:pda-2026-014:2026-03-11
     urn:dnp:schema:person-name:v1
     urn:dnp:api:consent:v2
     urn:dnp:dataset:connectivity-index:2026-06-30


Assignment:
   Assignment is closed. Names are assigned solely by PDA, or by an
   entity acting under a written instrument of delegation issued by
   PDA. Assignment is not open to application by third parties and
   there is no procedure by which an external party may request a
   name for a resource of its own.

   Delegation is contemplated because instruments within scope may
   be issued by federal or provincial entities under PDA's
   coordinating mandate. A delegation instrument specifies the
   classes and local-id ranges within which the delegate may
   assign and binds the delegate to the persistence commitment
   below. Delegations in force are listed in the Register. A
   delegation may be withdrawn; withdrawal has no effect on names
   already assigned under it, which remain valid and remain the
   responsibility of PDA.

   Uniqueness is enforced by construction. PDA maintains a single
   authoritative Register of all assigned names. A name comes into
   existence only by an entry in the Register, and the Register
   rejects any entry whose assigned-name is URN-equivalent to an
   existing entry. Delegated assignment operates against the same
   Register within non-overlapping allocations, so a delegate
   cannot create a collision.

   The Register records, for each name: the assigned-name; the
   instrument or edition identified; date of assignment; assigning
   entity; current status; current authoritative location(s); a
   SHA-256 digest of each edition-level resource as published, with
   the algorithm named in the record so it can be migrated without
   invalidating existing entries; titles and descriptive metadata in
   English and Urdu; and any equivalent identifiers in other
   identifier systems.

   Persistence. An assigned name is never reassigned to a different
   resource and is never withdrawn or deleted, under any
   circumstance. This holds where the instrument is superseded,
   repealed, withdrawn from effect or found to have been issued in
   error; where the issuing unit is abolished or merged; and where
   the instrument is no longer published. Each such fact is
   recorded as a status change in the Register and the name
   continues to identify what it has always identified. An error in
   assignment is corrected by recording the error and, if
   necessary, assigning a new name -- never by reusing the
   erroneous name.

   Institutional continuity. PDA is created by primary legislation
   rather than administrative order, and its dissolution or
   reconstitution would require an act of the legislature.
   Pakistani legislative practice on the reconstitution of
   statutory bodies provides for devolution of the functions,
   assets and records of a dissolved body upon a successor or upon
   the Division concerned; stewardship of this namespace is a
   function within the meaning of that practice. In addition, and
   not dependent on PDA's continued existence: the Register is
   published in full as a machine-readable open dataset on a
   regular cycle, so a complete copy exists outside PDA's systems
   at all times; PDA deposits the Register and the published corpus
   with Pakistan's national depository institutions and offers the
   same deposit to international web-archiving initiatives; and if
   stewardship is transferred, PDA or its successor will submit a
   revised registration template recording the change. Transfer of
   stewardship does not affect names already assigned.


Security and Privacy:
   Absence of personal data. Names are assigned only to published
   institutional instruments. A name must not be assigned to a
   natural person, to an identifier of a natural person, to an
   individual transaction or record, or to any resource whose
   representation contains personal data. This is stated
   normatively because PDA's statutory mandate includes national
   digital identity and data exchange infrastructure, and because
   the persistence properties that make URNs attractive for
   institutional documents make them actively harmful for
   identifiers of people: a URN cannot be revoked, and the
   non-reassignment commitment above is incompatible with any right
   of erasure. Extending this namespace to personal or
   transactional data would require a separate registration with a
   materially different persistence model, and PDA does not propose
   one. The Register records the names of officers only in their
   institutional capacity as approving authority, information
   already disclosed on the face of the published instrument.

   Comparison and confusion. The case-insensitivity rule introduces
   the general risks discussed in RFC 6943 for identifiers compared
   under case folding. Those risks are bounded here: the NSS is
   restricted to ASCII letters, digits, hyphen and full stop, so
   ASCII case folding is locale-independent, involves no expansion
   or contraction of characters, and admits no Unicode confusables;
   the Turkish dotless-i problem does not arise because folding is
   defined over the ASCII range only. Implementations must perform
   case folding over the ASCII range only and must not apply
   locale-sensitive case mapping. A false positive could cause a
   system to treat a conformance assertion against one instrument
   as an assertion against another; because the identified
   resources are public and the Register is published, such an
   error is detectable by inspection. Separately, because the
   work-level and edition-level forms are similar in appearance but
   identify different resources, an implementation that truncates
   or elides the edition field silently substitutes a work-level
   citation for an edition-level one, changing its meaning in
   conformance and contractual contexts. Implementations must not
   truncate names, and applications displaying names should display
   them in full, consistent with Section 4.4 of RFC 8141.

   Authenticity and spoofing. A name asserts nothing about the
   authenticity of any document it may be attached to; a third
   party can place the string "urn:dnp:standard:..." on an
   unauthorised document as easily as any other string. The
   Register, retrieved over an authenticated channel, is the sole
   authority for what a name identifies, and the cryptographic
   digests it records for edition-level resources allow a retrieved
   document to be checked against the published text. Consistent
   with Section 8 of RFC 8141, the information in this registration
   is a declaration and should be treated as advisory.

   Resolver operation. Queries to a PDA resolver reveal to PDA
   which instruments a client is interested in and, absent
   transport security, reveal the same to network observers.
   Because the corpus includes policy and regulatory instruments,
   that interest may be sensitive: a pattern of queries could
   indicate the direction of an entity's compliance work or a
   researcher's enquiry. Accordingly the PDA resolver is offered
   over HTTPS, does not require authentication, and does not
   require or set cookies. PDA retains resolver request logs only
   in aggregate form and only for capacity planning, and does not
   disclose individual query records. Directory harvesting is not a
   concern: the Register is published in full and complete
   enumeration of the namespace is an intended feature.


Interoperability:
   The string "DNP". "DNP" is used as a corporate brand by at least
   one substantial commercial enterprise unconnected with Pakistan,
   which holds trademark registrations in that string in several
   jurisdictions and operates a brand top-level domain under it.
   "DNP" is also an established abbreviation in chemistry and in
   professional sport. PDA claims no association with any of these,
   and registration of this NID neither asserts nor implies any
   right in the string outside the URN namespace registry. PDA has
   selected the string because it is the statutory short form of
   Digital Nation Pakistan, the programme established by the Act of
   the same name, and not for any associative value. PDA notes that
   a URN NID and a trademark occupy different registries with
   different scopes, that no resource identified in this namespace
   is a commercial good or service, and that Section 5.1 of
   RFC 8141 leaves disputes over strings to the parties concerned.
   PDA will engage in good faith with any objection raised during
   Expert Review.

   Legal norms. Names in this namespace are not assigned to primary
   legislation of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan; authority over
   the authoritative text of Acts of Parliament rests with organs
   of the State other than PDA, and the "lex" namespace (RFC 9676)
   is the appropriate vehicle. Instruments in this namespace
   frequently cite Pakistani legislation; such citations use "lex"
   or the Gazette reference. An instrument issued by PDA under a
   statutory power is identified here as a directive; the statutory
   power itself is not.

   Bibliographic identifiers. Pakistan has no registered National
   Bibliography Number sub-namespace under RFC 8458 at the time of
   writing. Should the national library register one and assign
   numbers within this corpus, the resulting names would coexist
   with names in this namespace and be recorded as equivalences in
   the Register. The same applies to Digital Object Identifiers,
   which PDA assigns to some publications through a DOI
   registration agency.

   Internal document codes. PDA's internal document nomenclature
   codes appear within local-id in transformed form. Those codes
   circulate outside the URN context and a reader may encounter one
   in isolation. A bare code is not a URN and must not be treated
   as one. The transformation from code to local-id is defined in
   the PDA specification cited under Documentation; it is not in
   general reversible by inspection and implementations must not
   attempt to reverse it algorithmically.

   Character handling. Because names never contain percent-encoded
   octets or non-ASCII characters, the encoding pitfalls that arise
   when pre-existing identifier systems are mapped into URN syntax
   do not arise here.

   Protocol slots. Consistent with Section 4.1 of RFC 8141, a name
   in this namespace is not a locator and should not be placed in a
   URI protocol slot whose defined semantics require dereferencing
   to a representation. It is appropriate in citation fields,
   metadata records, conformance declarations and provenance
   assertions.


Resolution:
   Resolution is intended. PDA operates and undertakes to continue
   to operate a resolution service for names in this namespace.

   The service is offered over HTTPS at a stable endpoint under a
   Government of Pakistan domain, published in the PDA
   specification cited under Documentation. A client resolves a
   name by requesting the assigned-name as a path component of that
   endpoint.

   Resolution follows the work/edition distinction. A work-level
   name resolves to the current authoritative edition of the
   instrument where one is in force, and otherwise to a record
   describing the instrument and its editions. An edition-level
   name resolves to that fixed edition and continues to do so after
   it has been superseded; a superseded edition remains
   retrievable, marked as superseded with a reference to the
   edition that superseded it. PDA does not remove superseded
   editions from publication.

   A client requesting a representation of the identified resource
   receives it, or a redirection to its current location. A client
   requesting metadata by content negotiation receives the Register
   record, including status, provenance, digests and equivalent
   identifiers. Resolution of a syntactically valid but unassigned
   name is distinguishable from resolution of a name assigned to an
   instrument no longer in force; the two are different conditions
   and are reported differently.

   Resolution is a convenience and is not constitutive. A name
   remains valid, and continues to identify what the Register says
   it identifies, irrespective of whether any resolver is reachable
   and irrespective of whether the identified resource is currently
   retrievable.

   PDA does not at present operate a registration process for
   third-party publicly advertised resolution services for this
   namespace and does not at present recommend any resolver other
   than its own. Should PDA establish such a process, the
   requirements for being publicly advertised will be published
   alongside the specification cited under Documentation and this
   registration will be revised. PDA defines no r-components and
   its resolver ignores any that are presented.


Documentation:
   [1] Sohail, H., Ed., "A Uniform Resource Name (URN) Namespace for
       Digital Nation Pakistan (DNP)", Work in Progress,
       Internet-Draft, draft-sohail-urn-dnp-00, 5 August 2026,
       <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-sohail-urn-dnp/>.

   A stable specification maintained by PDA is published at
   https://standards.dnp.gov.pk/ under the PDA document
   nomenclature framework and is kept synchronised with this
   registration.


Additional Information:
   The Digital Nation Pakistan Act, 2025 establishes PDA and sets
   out its functions, including the specification of national
   digital standards and the coordination of digitalisation across
   government. The Act is the source of PDA's authority to issue
   the instruments identified in this namespace and of the
   institutional continuity described under Assignment.

   Registrations by national government bodies in this registry
   include those of the Federal Chancellery of the Republic of
   Austria and of New Zealand (RFC 4350), and by national memory
   institutions including the National Archives of Finland. This
   registration follows the same pattern: a national public
   authority seeking durable identification of a defined corpus of
   official material, without any claim to a country-code-derived
   namespace. PDA notes that Section 5.1 of RFC 8141 reserves
   strings of the form ALPHA ALPHA "-" for possible future
   country-code-based registration; this registration does not use,
   anticipate or depend on any such reservation.


Revision Information:
   None. This is the initial registration.
Thanks
Best Regards,
Director - Stakeholder Engagement
________________________________
[Pakistan Digital Authority]
[Phone]
[Mobile]
[Email]
+92 51 920 5027
[email protected]
[Location]


4th Floor, 5-A Constitution Avenue
Sector F-5/1, Islamabad
44000, Pakistan
[Digital Nation Pakistan]
[Transforming Pakistan into a Digital Nation, enabling a Digital Society, Digital Economy, and Digital Governance]

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