Internet Info 1997 December/Internet_Info_CD-ROM_Walnut_Creek_December_1997.iso/ietf/urn/urn-archives/urn-ietf.archive.9611/000045_owner-urn-ietf _Tue Nov 5 21:38:08 1996.msg

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Date: Tue, 5 Nov 1996 21:36:55 -0500
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From: Lewis Girod <[e-mail]>
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In-Reply-To: <[e-mail]> (message from
    Terry Allen on Tue, 5 Nov 1996 16:57:00 -0800 (PST))
Subject: Re: [URN] I18N does not belong in URNs
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   Date: Tue, 5 Nov 1996 16:57:00 -0800 (PST)
   From: Terry Allen <[e-mail]>

   Our longest-lived names actually are meaningful to humans; to support
   your argument you have to establish that semantic drift affects
   names specifically (Moby Dick, Julius Caesar, Assurnasirpal) and
   that using them in the context of a defined name space does not
   insulate them from semantic drift.

The names you are using as examples are all long lived because they
refer to conceptually immutable objects.  This is the case in which
names are afforded some protection from semantic drift, although it
does not necessarily protect them completely.  Out of context, I can't
tell if you mean Julius Caesar the guy who got stabbed or Julius
Caesar the play (and that was not an issue when JC was around!,) but
in the context of a namespace of people or plays that problem would be
resolved.  Either way the name refers to a piece of history that,
whether or not it is well defined, people have an idea of what you
mean that doesn't change too much.

However, I think what Keith was getting at was a problem that arises
when semantics is embedded in names in an attept to structure
hierarchical namespaces.  The sort of semantic mechanism involved with
categorizing things is much more likely to drift over time; a
collection of companies originally categorized under ``Mainframes''
might want to recategorize under ``Enterprise systems''.  (Over longer
spans of time spellings and meanings of words change -- Julius Caesar
was originally filed under playes perhaps.)  In the context of URNs,
every move we make we are stuck with forever... which eventually leads
to silly results and overall cruftiness.  There is little point in
having semantically significant names unless you retain semantics that
makes sense as time goes on.

Of course, as you point out there is no way to stop people from
putting semantics into names; the most effective way to deal with the
issue is to implement a system of user friendly names over the top of
URNs; 99% of the time the user would see and type only a UFN, and
these UFNs would be resolved to the URNs that could then be used as
long-lived references.

-lewis