GÉANT community has access to high-level namespace for unique resource identification

Five NRENs and two projects granted urn:geant namespace

Friday 29 February 2008, Cambridge, UK:  DANTE now administers the uniform resource name (URN) namespace, urn:geant, and has already delegated sub-namespaces to the NRENs RedIRIS, CESNET,  SWITCH, NIIF and DFN, and to the eduGAIN and eduroam projects.

A uniform resource name is a hierarchical naming schema for creating and applying permanent, unique names to system elements, irrespective of their location.  The hierarchy begins with the top-level namespace (in this case urn:geant) and beneath that top-level, other naming levels are created to provide a hierarchy that not only results in a unique name for the entity, but can also describe (for example) who owns it and what it’s for. This means that workers and software can distinguish and accurately identify elements even if they have been named the same.

For example, you might have two applications that use an element called schedule: in one it refers to an accounting schedule and for the other it is a time schedule. By giving the accounting schedule the URN accounting:schedule and the project schedule the URN time:schedule, they can easily be distinguished between. This is just a simple example. The urn:geant system administered by DANTE is more sophisticated but uses the same logic to allow for project resources to be named uniquely, permanently, and independent of location.

The URN schema will be particularly important for the GEANT community which produces many kinds of project resources: documents, specifications, working drafts, project reports, xml schemas, style-sheets and so on. URN provides an easy, efficient way to assign globally unique, persistent and location-independent names to resources that they create.

On request DANTE will delegate namespaces to NRENs and long-term projects or activities which they, in turn, will sub-delegate. So universities and institutions external to the GEANT community are encouraged to obtain their urn:geant namespaces from their reference NREN, so taking the next level down in the naming tree.

It is DANTE’s responsibility to guarantee the uniqueness of the names allocated urn:geant and subsequently the responsibility of each entity, be it NREN, university or project, with a sub-namespace to guarantee uniqueness of names in their branch of the naming hierarchy.

DANTE registered its top-level urn:geant namespace in August 2007 with the US namespace agency, IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, http://www.iana.org/), becoming one of the registered formal URN namespaces in the Official IANA Registry of URN Namespaces (http://www.iana.org/assignments/urn-namespaces).

For more details about URN, including how to request a urn:geant namespace and to see the current register listing the urn:geant namespace delegation, visit http://www.geant2.net/server/show/nav.1875.