[Open-bio-l] open-bio URNs

[Lincoln Stein]

(1) I prefer the .org there, since we don't own open-bio.com

(2) Replace : with _ and / with -?
	Doesn't seem very attractive.  Is it the Mac HFS that doesn't
	like the : character?

Lincoln

On Thursday 10 April 2003 06:54 am, Matthew Pocock wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Some of us have been having a discussion about using
> URNs for biological entities like file formats,
> alphabets and applications like blast. The upshot was
> that LSIDs do not seem to be a good fit to a lot of
> these problems.
>
> I've checked in version 0.1 of a spec for open-bio
> URNs. It is intended as a basis for discussion, and
> although probably is 90% right, nothing is set in
> stone.
>
> The draft spec is in:
>   pub.open-bio.org:/home/repository/obf-common
> in module:
>   obda-specs
> in the directory:
>   naming
>
> As we develop code that uses these URNs and register
> new identifiers with CVS, I'm sure that bugs in the
> spec will make themselves apparent. Hopefully by the
> next hackathon, this will all be done & dusted and we
> can chalk it up as a very booring, but necisary
> exercise in computer science, like learning how to set
> up environment variables or install emboss.
>
> We should push these URNs through the flat file
> indexing spec (replacing the hackey list of supported
> file types) and think about where else it would help
> to have unique and unambiguous names for things.
>
> Brian King sent me a couple of usefull links that
> interested people should probably browse:
>
> http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3406.txt
> http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3121.txt
>
> Matthew
>
> ps 2 open issues that we could do with discussing as a
> group:
>
> 1) at the moment we're prefixing these things as
> urn:open-bio.org:, but perhaps urn:open-bio: would be
> better. We should decide upon this before considering
> official registration of the URN namespace.
>
> 2) the registration process (putting files in CVS with
> names starting with the URN) doesn't work very well as
> URNs contain characters of significance to file
> systems (: and /). We could stick these all into a
> single file, but that may become practicaly quite hard
> to manage. And, then we'd fight over the file format
> (+1 for xml + schema). Also, multiple people editing
> one file may cause CVS to throw wobblies. Any ideas?
>
>
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-- 
Lincoln Stein
lstein at cshl.org
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
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Cold Spring Harbor, NY 11724
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