Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia
2. Requirements for functional capabilities
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Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia
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Requests For Comments
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RFC 1737
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2. Requirements for functional capabilities
2. Requirements for functional capabilities
These are the requirements for URNs' functional capabilities:
- Global scope: A URN is a name with global scope which does not
imply a location. It has the same meaning everywhere.
- Global uniqueness: The same URN will never be assigned to two
different resources.
- Persistence: It is intended that the lifetime of a URN be
permanent. That is, the URN will be globally unique forever, and
may well be used as a reference to a resource well beyond the
lifetime of the resource it identifies or of any naming authority
involved in the assignment of its name.
- Scalability: URNs can be assigned to any resource that might
conceivably be available on the network, for hundreds of years.
- Legacy support: The scheme must permit the support of existing
legacy naming systems, insofar as they satisfy the other
requirements described here. For example, ISBN numbers, ISO
public identifiers, and UPC product codes seem to satisfy the
functional requirements, and allow an embedding that satisfies
the syntactic requirements described here.
- Extensibility: Any scheme for URNs must permit future extensions to
the scheme.
- Independence: It is solely the responsibility of a name issuing
authority to determine the conditions under which it will issue a
name.
- Resolution: A URN will not impede resolution (translation into a
URL, q.v.). To be more specific, for URNs that have corresponding
URLs, there must be some feasible mechanism to translate a URN to a
URL.
Next: 3. Requirements for URN encoding
Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia
2. Requirements for functional capabilities