Network Working Group F. Hendrikx
Request for Comments: 4350 C. Wallis
Category: Informational New Zealand Government
February 2006
A Uniform Resource Name (URN) Formal Namespace
for the New Zealand Government
Status of This Memo
This memo provides information for the Internet community. It does
not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this
memo is unlimited.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2006).
Abstract
This document describes a Uniform Resource Name (URN) Namespace
Identification (NID)convention as prescribed by the World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C) for identifying, naming, assigning, and managing
persistent resources and XML artefacts for the New Zealand
Government.
1. Introduction
The New Zealand Government has already adopted XML as its primary
means of storing and exchanging data. The New Zealand Government
publishes documents, schemas, and other government artefacts.
The New Zealand Government now wishes to define a namespace
convention and structure for its agencies by creating and managing
globally unique, persistent, location-independent identifiers for
their schema resources and XML artefacts.
This is a natural extension of the development of the Dublin Core
based New Zealand Government metadata standard (New Zealand
Government Locator Service, or NZGLS) used by government agencies to
create metadata and made operational to the public through an all-
of-government portal.
The New Zealand Government wishes to provide guidance on namespaces
to its agencies so that they use a portion of the adopted namespace
to minimise the risk of their creating different (and potentially
conflicting) namespace structures. This issue potentially extends to
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data exchange beyond government into the private sector of New
Zealand, thus placing the government under an obligation to provide
guidance in the assignment and management of additional namespaces.
The New Zealand Government wishes to register the country NID, NZL,
with the Name Specific String (NSS) split into two parts; the first
part being a specific sub-type <nz-specifier> and the second part as
a <nz-specifier defined string>.
As part of the URN structure, the New Zealand Government wishes to
define and subsequently manage the "govt" specifier. It will also
assign additional specifiers requested by other New Zealand
organisations in accordance with the rules and processes proposed
herein.
The New Zealand Government hoped to make use of the two-letter
Namespace Identifier (NID) combination for its ubiquitous country
code, NZ. But since there is as yet no process to register these
(see RFC 3406 [1]) the government has opted to request its well-known
alternative three-letter country code (see ISO 3166 [3]).
This namespace specification requests a formal namespace (see [6] for
more information about formal namespaces).
Please note that this paper includes a discussion on the use of
diacritic marks, in particular, Maori macrons. Maori is an official
language of New Zealand. In recognition of the established practice
of publishing RFCs for a global audience in ASCII text where
diacritic marks are unable to be recognised, the text has been
presented without macrons.
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RFC 4350 URN for New Zealand Government February 2006
2. Specification Template
Namespace ID:
"NZL".
Registration Information:
Version Number: 1
Date: 2005-03-31
Declared registrant of the namespace:
State Services Commission
New Zealand Government
100 Molesworth Street
Wellington,
New Zealand
Email: e-GIF@ssc.govt.nz
Declaration of structure:
The identifier has a hierarchical structure as follows:
urn:nzl:<nz-specifier>[:<nz-specifier defined string>]+
+ denotes one or more occurrences of nz-specifier defined strings
all delimited by a colon.
For example:
urn:nzl:govt:registering:dogs:registration:1-0
urn:nzl:govt:registering:firearms:form:1-3
urn:nzl:govt:registering:recreational_fishing:form:1-0
The <nz-specifier> and <nz-specifier defined string> can comprise
any UTF-8 characters compliant with URI syntax and must not
contain the ":" character (see STD 66, RFC 3986 [2]). The
exclusion of the colon from the list of other characters means
that the colon can only occur as a delimiter between string
values. The values come from the terms listed in the NZGLS.
The State Services Commission (SSC) will take responsibility for
the <nz-specifier> "govt" and its sub level <nz-specifier defined
string> terms; e.g., "registering".
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The SSC will take responsibility to assign other <nz-specifiers>
to organisations who apply and can satisfy the SSC that they have
the capability to manage the sub level and its applicable <nz-
specifier defined string(s)>.
Relevant ancillary documentation:
The function and noun syntax used in the <nz-specifier defined
string> is based on and taken from the NZGLS
(http://www.e.govt.nz/standards/nzgls/thesauri/).
Identifier uniqueness considerations:
Identifiers in the <nz-specifier> "govt" are defined and assigned
in the requested namespace by the SSC after ensuring that the URNs
to be assigned are unique. Uniqueness is achieved by checking
against the registry of previously assigned names.
The SSC will ensure that the URNs to be assigned to other
organisations applying for other <nz-specifier(s)> (e.g., mil, co,
org) are unique by checking against the registry of previously
assigned names.
The SSC will develop and publish the process for doing this,
which, where applicable, is consistent with the process it uses
for moderating the .govt.nz Top Level Domain (TLD).
Identifier persistence considerations:
The New Zealand Government is committed to maintaining uniqueness
and persistence of all resources identified by assigned URNs.
Given that the URN sought is NZL (the long-held ISO 3166 Alpha-3
representation of the country) and that the country's independence
from any other jurisdiction expected to continue indefinitely, the
URN should also persist indefinitely.
Likewise, the <nz-specifier> "govt" has a very long life
expectancy and can be expected to remain unique for the
foreseeable future. The assignment process guarantees that names
are not reassigned. The binding between the name and its resource
is permanent.
The SSC will ensure that other organisations applying to manage
other <nz-specifier> Second Level Name (2LN) sub-levels of the NZL
URN namespace (e.g., mil, co, org) uniquely assign the namespace
at this level.
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Process of identifier assignment:
Under the "NZL" NID, the New Zealand Government will manage the
<nz-specifier> "govt" and leverage the existing NZGLS thesaurus
for identifier resources to maintain uniqueness.
The process of assigning URNs at the <nz-specifier> sub-level will
be managed by the SSC of the New Zealand Government. (The SSC has
managed and maintained the NZGLS thesauri since its inception in
2002 and has moderated the TLD .govt.nz).
The SSC will develop and publish the process for doing this, which
is consistent with the process it uses for moderating the .govt.nz
TLD, where applicable. The process for marketing the ".govt.nz"
TLD can be found at these links:
http://www.e.govt.nz/moderation/mod-policy/chapter1.html
and
http://www.e.govt.nz/moderation/mod-policy/chapter2.html
The process is drawn from the 2LD policies and procedures of the
New Zealand Office of the Domain Name Commissioner,
http://dnc.org.nz (and specifically
http://www.dnc.org.nz/story/30043-35-1.html).
Other New Zealand organisations may apply to the SSC to delegate
specifiers for resolution and management assigned by them.
Delegation of this responsibility will not be unreasonably
withheld provided that the processes for their resolution and
management are robust and are followed.
Organisations who apply to have a <nz-specifier> assigned to them
must satisfy the SSC that they have the capability to manage the
2LN sub-level and its applicable <nz-specifier defined string(s)>
responsibly. The policies and procedures in the links above will
be provided to applicants as a guide and will be used by the SSC
to determine the applicant's capability.
Process of identifier resolution:
For the <nz-specifier> "govt", the SSC will maintain lists of
assigned identifiers on its web pages at http://www.e.govt.nz/.
The SSC will require other organisations that apply to manage
other <nz-specifier> sub-levels to follow this practice unless
there are specific reasons (e.g., security) not to do so.
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Rules for Lexical Equivalence:
The lexical equivalence of the NZL namespace-specific strings
(NSSs) is defined as an exact, but not case-sensitive, string
match. Best Practice guidelines will specify:
a) NZL in either uppercase or lowercase (The New Zealand
government will assign names as case-insensitive, to ensure
that there will not be two NZL URNs differing only by case.)
b) The first letter of each <nz-specifier> and <nz specifier
defined string> in uppercase or the whole value in lowercase.
c) Any identifier in NZL namespaces can be compared using the
normal mechanisms for percent-encoded UTF-8 strings.
Note that textual data containing diacritic marks (such as Maori
macrons) will not be treated as lexically equivalent to textual
data without diacritic marks; i.e., a distinction will be made.
It is important to note that a macron can change the meaning of a
word in the Maori language.
The following explanation provides guidance in this respect.
NSS is any UTF-8-encoded string that is compliant with the URN
syntax (i.e., following the encoding rules for 8-bit characters).
Since Maori is an official language in New Zealand and its use of
diacritic marks (in this case macrons) invokes the requirement to
percent-encode reserved characters, the following extract from RFC
3986 [4] is applicable.
When a new URI scheme defines a component that represents
textual data consisting of characters from the Universal
Character Set [UCS], the data should first be encoded as octets
according to the UTF-8 character encoding [STD63]; then only
those octets that do not correspond to characters in the
unreserved set should be percent-encoded. For example, the
character A would be represented as "A", the character LATIN
CAPITAL LETTER A WITH GRAVE would be represented as "%C3%80",
and the character KATAKANA LETTER A would be represented as
"%E3%82%A2".
As described above, UTF-8 allows the use of diacritic marks such
as New Zealand Maori macrons.
In the New Zealand context, the word "Maori" carries a diacritic
mark over the "a". A URI including the macronised word "Maori"
would be percent-encoded as M%C4%81ori.
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Given that the "govt" namespaces will draw from the NZGLS
thesaurus (which does not at present utilise diacritic marks), the
"govt" <nz-specifier> will not utilise UTF-8's percent-encoding
convention for diacritic marks. An "a" with a diacritic mark will
be presented simply as an "a". There is no mapping or equivalence
table. Therefore, the requirement to distinguish between terms
that have diacritic marks and those that do not will not arise in
the <nz-specifier> "govt".
Other organisations may use diacritic marks with certain
conditions. Organisations that apply to manage other
<nz-specifier> sub-levels of the NZL URN namespace could utilise
UTF-8's diacritic functionality provided that they have the
applicable processes to separate Maori language terms using
macrons from those that do not, in order to ensure uniqueness in
accordance with rule c) above.
Conformance with URN Syntax:
No special considerations.
Validation mechanism:
None other than names being derived from the NZGLS thesaurus
"dictionary".
Scope:
Global, but primarily of national interest.
3. Namespace Considerations
The SSC undertook a preliminary study of the URI alternatives against
the key requirements. The options were narrowed down to five. These
were a private URI scheme, URL, PURL, IRI, and URN. URN was
considered the most appropriate URI against the criteria.
Consultation on the preliminary study was actively sought from the
Internet Society of NZ (InternetNZ), the NZ Computer Society,
applicable vendors, and government agencies. Publication on the
e-government web site allowed for public participation.
Points that should be noted are:
a) With respect to the NID, the New Zealand Government is the first
known jurisdiction to apply its globally known ISO 3166 Alpha-3
country code to become a URN. One objective of the ISO 3166
Alpha-2 and 3-letter country codes was to provide uniqueness.
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b) The namespace follows the logical structure of the NZGLS as shown
in the examples above.
4. Community Considerations
Providers of government information for data exchange benefit by the
publication of the namespace because it provides much-needed guidance
on generating target namespaces for schema development using a
process that reflects what they already know; namely, metadata
creation in NZGLS. The identifiers under the "govt" specifier will
track the terms used in the New Zealand government thesaurus.
Consequently, New Zealanders will ultimately benefit since the
exchange of more structured information will potentially improve
online experiences in areas such as forms design.
Any citizen or organisation with Internet web browser capability will
be entitled to access the namespace and its associated application,
registration, and resolution services. While the assignment of
identifiers will be managed by the SSC, additional specifiers (such
as mil, co, org, and their <nz-specifier defined string(s)>) can be
openly applied for and registered by anyone following an approved
namespace governance process and proof of the applicant's bona fide
association with the intended specifier (i.e., no squatting or
hoarding).
5. IANA Considerations
This document includes a URN NID registration for NZL for entry in
the IANA registry of URN NIDs (see RFC 2434 [5] for more
information).
6. Security Considerations
No serious security implications are envisaged beyond the potential
threat of spoofing. The application, registration and assignment of
subsequent specifiers will leverage existing government processes to
authenticate the applicants and their association with the proposed
specifier application.
7. Acknowledgements
Since the specification described in this document is derived from
STD 66, RFC 3986 and RFC 3406, the acknowledgements in those
documents still apply. In addition, the authors wish to acknowledge
Leslie Daigle and Ted Hardie for their suggestions and review.
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8. References
8.1. Normative References
[1] Daigle, L., van Gulik, D., Iannella, R., and P. Faltstrom,
"Uniform Resource Names (URN) Namespace Definition Mechanisms",
BCP 66, RFC 3406, October 2002.
[2] Berners-Lee, T., Fielding, R., and L. Masinter, "Uniform
Resource Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax", STD 66, RFC 3986,
January 2005.
[3] ISO 3166, "Country name codes", ISO 3166-1:1997.
8.2. Informative References
[4] Berners-Lee, T., Fielding, R., and L. Masinter, "Uniform
Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax", STD 66, RFC 3986,
January 2005.
[5] Narten, T. and H. Alvestrand, "Guidelines for Writing an IANA
Considerations Section in RFCs", BCP 26, RFC 2434, October 1998.
[6] URI Planning Interest Group, W3C/IETF (See acknowledgments)
September 2001,
<http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/NOTE-uri-clarification-20010921/>.
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Authors' Addresses
Ferry Hendrikx
Information & Communications Technology (ICT) Branch
State Services Commission
PO Box 329
Wellington
New Zealand
Phone: +64 4 495 6600
EMail: ferry.hendrikx@ssc.govt.nz
Colin Wallis
Information & Communications Technology (ICT) Branch
State Services Commission
PO Box 329
Wellington
New Zealand
Phone: +64 4 495 6600
EMail: colin.wallis@ssc.govt.nz
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RFC 4350 URN for New Zealand Government February 2006
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