RE: [emergency] EDXL-DE routing and valueListUrn

["Ham, Gary A" <hamg@BATTELLE.ORG>]

Renato has it exactly right.  If the identifier resolves to a specific
URL only, systems will have difficulty if the URL is down for any
reason. But the party responsible for a URN can make the resource
available in multiple ways, even sneaker net, if necessary (as is often
done when crossing from unclassified to classified systems).  Ideally,
you might want to associate a URN with a source URL, but only as an
authoritative reference, because most of the time using the URL is just
a lot of extra work retrieving a foreign source that could be kept
locally.

For the EDXL-DE, in particular, the value is in the URN as a unique
identifier that tells me whether I know how to process the content or
not.  If I don't know the URN, I cannot do specialized processing. If I
do, I can. It is as simple as that.

Respectfully,

Gary A. Ham 
Senior Research Scientist
Battelle Memorial Institute
540-288-5611 (office)
703-869-6241 (cell)
"You would be surprised what you can accomplish when you do not care who
gets the credit." - Harry S. Truman

-----Original Message-----
From: Renato Iannella [mailto:renato@nicta.com.au] 
Sent: Tuesday, March 21, 2006 7:00 PM
To: Ron Lake
Cc: Emergency_Mgt_TC TC; David Ellis; SIA Pilot-6; Harry Haury;
Haleftiras, Pericles; Carl Reed OGC Account; Glaser, Ronald
Subject: Re: [emergency] EDXL-DE routing and valueListUrn



On 22 Mar 2006, at 09:41, Ron Lake wrote:

> My view is that it should - else how do you know what it means?
> In effect you are saying that a URN "resolves" to a text description 
> somewhere but the somewhere is not defined?

Agree, but there is role for unique identifiers.

For example, the EDXL-DE XML Schema has this unique identifier:
    urn:oasis:names:tc:emergency:EDXL:DE:1.0

You could resolve this to a URL (to get the actual XML Schema file) but
it does not (yet). It is up to the registrant of the namespace
identifier to provide these services.



Cheers...  Renato Iannella
National ICT Australia (NICTA)



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