Network Working Group K. Nielsen
Internet-Draft Danish Maritime Authority
Intended status: Informational June 13, 2017
Expires: December 15, 2017
Maritime Resource Names (MRN)
draft-knielsen-mrn-urn-01
Abstract
This document describes a Uniform Resource Name (URN) namespace
intended for persistently and uniquely naming maritime resources.
published by the International Association of Lighthouse Authorities
(IALA AISM).
Status of This Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. Specification Template . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
3. Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
4. Namespace Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
5. Community Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
6. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
7. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
8. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
1. Introduction
IALA is a non-profit, international technical association founded in
1957. It gathers together marine aids to navigation authorities,
manufacturers, consultants, and, scientific and training institutes
from all parts of the world and offers them the opportunity to
exchange and compare their experiences and achievements.
Although a lot of standardized identifier schemes for vessels, buoys,
mariners and other maritime resources already exist in the maritime
world. There is no single system that allows people to specify such
an identifier in a uniform and unambiguous way. We believe that it
makes sense to introduce a naming scheme that can uniquely identify
any maritime resource on a global scale. By maritime resource we
more or less
mean anything that has an identity of some kind. This could be
organizations, employees, a person, a physical or a virtual object,
for instance an electronic document, a buoy, a ship, a mariner, a
nautical chart or an electronic service (e.g., "today's weather
report for the Oresund Strait"). Not all resources are "retrievable"
in an electronic sense; For example, human beings, corporations, and
buoys. However, they can still be considered a resource.
It is our opinion that having such a naming scheme will facilitate
innovation, integration, trade, safety, and security in the maritime
sector, by paving the way for new kind of maritime digital
information services.
This document defines such a standard naming system, based on Uniform
Resource Names (URNs).
2. Specification Template
Namespace ID
"mrn"
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Registration Information
Registration version number: 1
Registration date: 2017-xx-xx
Declared Registrant of the Namespace
Registering organization:
International Association of Lighthouse Authorities (IALA)
10 rue des Gaudines
78100
St Germain en Laye
France
Email: contact@iala-aism.org
Designated Contact:
International Association of Lighthouse Authorities (IALA)
Email: info@mrnregistry.org
Declaration of structure:
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The Namespace Specific String (NSS) of all URNs that use the
"mrn" NID shall have the following structure:
::= "urn:mrn:" ":"
::= 1*(ALPHA / DIGIT) ; Organizational ID
::= ":" ; Organizational specific string
::= 1*(ALPHA / DIGIT / "-")
; Organizational specific namespace ID
::= 1* ; Organizational specific namespace string
DIGIT ::= %x30-39 ; 0-9
ALPHA ::= %x61-7A ; a-z
Basics of the ABNF notation used :
" " literals (terminal character strings); terms not in quotes are
non-terminals
/ alternatives
() indicates a sequence group, used as a single alternative or as a
single repeating group
* indicates that the following term or group can repeat at
least and at most times; default values are 0 and
infinity, respectively
; comment
As defined in [@!RFC2141]
Relevant ancillary documentation:
The process for assigning unique organizational IDs is managed by
IALA. Details and application process can be found at
.
Identifier uniqueness considerations:
Guaranteeing uniqueness is a two-way process. First, IALA will
guarantee that each organization will be assigned a unique
organizational id that will never be reused. Second, each
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organization must guarantee that they do not assign identical
organizational specific strings (OSS).
Identifier persistence considerations:
Each individual organization must guarantee that assigned URNs
will not be reused and will remain valid beyond the lifecycle of
the referenced resources. However, it should be noted that
although the URNs remain valid, the status of the referenced
resource may change.
Process of identifier assignment:
While the assignment of OIDs for each organization is managed by
IALA. The assignment of organization specific namespace ids and
strings are fully managed by each individual organization.
Process of identifier resolution:
There are no plans to provide a general available resolution
mechanism. However, organizations are free to setup resolution
servers for all or part of the URNs assigned under their
organizational id.
Rules for Lexical Equivalence:
The entire URN is case insensitive.
Conformity with URN syntax:
There are no additional characters reserved except as noted in the
ABNF above.
Validation mechanism:
In the case of each sub-namespace, there will be namespace-
specific rules for determining validity. There are no plans to
provide a central repository for these rules.
Scope:
Global.
3. Examples
All the examples provided in the following section are hypothetical
examples. Real world naming schemes will most likely look different.
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Using the MRN identifier scheme a vessel with an IMO number of
9743368 could be identified as follows:
urn:mrn:imo:imo-number:9743368
The governing organization of how to assign IMO numbers is the
International Maritime Organization (IMO). IMO may have delegated
the actual assignment of numbers to another organization. But IMO is
still the organization who has determined that an IMO number is an
unique seven-digit number. Within the context of maritime resource
names the organizational id (OID) refers to the organization who
governs the syntax and rules of a particular resource type. In the
above case the organizational ID is "imo".
Each organization further divides the organizational specific string
(OSS), which is the part following "imo", into two parts. An
organizational specific namespace ID (OSNID) which is a unique
identifier within the governing organization for a particular type of
resource. In this example, we have used "imo-number" but it could
just as well have been "imonumber" or just "number".
The second part is the organizational specific namespace string
(OSNS). Which is the only part that differs for resources of the
same type, in this case it is "9743368". The organizational specific
namespace string is (as the name implies) specific for a combination
of a OID and OSNID. In this case the organizational specific
namespace string is always a 7 digit IMO number.
Another way to identify the same vessel might be to use its MMSI
number. Here the identifier could look like this:
urn:mrn:itu:mmsi:538070999
In this case ITU is the governing body because MMSI numbers are based
on recommendation M.585 from ITU. It might be that national bodies
does the actual assignment of MMSI numbers, but ITU is the governing
body for the standardization of MMSI numbers.
As can be seen from these two examples. The same vessel can be
identified by multiple different identifiers. This is no different
to a person who might be identified either by his driver license
number or his social security id. Multiple identities can identify
the same entity. Some parameters frequently used for identification,
such as 'names of people', do most of the time qualify as
identifiers, as they are not guaranteed to be unique. A single
identifier must refer to one and only one identity.
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The concept of URNs can be taken from a very coarse grained level to
a very fine grained level. For example, a container ship might be
identified by one of the two previous URL's. The containers aboard
the ship might be identified with an URN adapting the ISO 6346
identifier scheme for container ids.
urn:mrn:bic:container-id:csqu3054383
Finally, individual items in a single container might be identified
by another URN scheme. It might even be possible to integrate with
URNs defined outside of the urn:mrn namespace. For example, all
items in a container might be identified by an electronic product
code ([RFC5134]). In other words, the usage of URNs as identifiers
are not limited to those defined within this document. In the future
other non-maritime sectors might even adopt similar naming schemes
based on URNs to facilitate easier integration across sector
boundaries.
An identifier does not need to be a physical object, but can be a
virtual item such as an electronic document. For example, IMO might
decide that all of their documents would use a "publications" prefix.
So
urn:mrn:imo:publications:if110s
would refer to the publication "IMO SOLAS Consolidated Spanish
Edition, 2014 IF110S"
On the other hand an organization such as IALA might decide that all
of their publications would follow another format where the category
of the publication is included in the identifier. For example, a
recommendation could be
urn:mrn:iala:publications:recommendation:e-nav-140
while the identifier of a guideline might be written as
urn:mrn:iala:publications:guideline:synchronisation-of-lights-1069
As can be seen from the previous example the Organizational specific
namespace string can be split into multiple hierarchies. It is all
up to the governing organization how they want to structure their
identifiers.
Another example of identifiers with multiple hierarchies could be an
identifier scheme for lights and buoys. Here IALA could choose to
let the OSNS consist of :. For
example
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urn:mrn:iala:aton:us:1234x5
There are no requirements that organizations are permanent entities.
For example, the European STM Validation project could choose to use
"stm" as their organizational id. So, for example, a voyage id in
this project might look like
urn:mrn:stm:voyage:id:xcus231230
Internally in the project they can use xcus231230 to refer to a
voyage plan. But when working with external systems or other
projects the full URN can be used in case other projects uses another
type of identifier for a particular voyage.
As can be seen from all these examples. The scheme is highly
adaptable. Each organization can choose their own layout for a
specific type of identifiers. It is easy to fit existing identifiers
into the naming scheme. And it provides good context information
about the type of the identifier in comparison to something simple
like a random UUID.
4. Namespace Considerations
IALA traditionally addresses the maritime community, but its
resources are made available to all interested parties. While URN
namespaces may exist for which any generic naming system can be
encoded. Is is the goal of IALA to foster a community around
maritime resource names within the global maritime community.
Therefore, the possibility of binding to various other namespace
repositories have been deemed impractical.
5. Community Considerations
Members of the IALA community will benefit from persistent and
globally unique identifiers for use in software and in conformance
with protocols developed and used by IALA and third-party
collaborators.
While in general organizations will be free to structure their
organization specific namespace in any way they see fit (as long as
they guarantee uniqueness and persistence). It is our intention to
provide general guidelines and best practices in the future. For
example, encouraging that every organization use "publications" as
the organization specific namespace id for referring to official
publications from them. Or that every identifier that refers to a
country uses standards available in ISO 3166 for the representation
of names of countries and their subdivisions.
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6. Security Considerations
There are no additional security considerations other than those
normally associated with the use and resolution of URNs in general,
which are described in [RFC1737], [RFC2141], and [RFC3406].
7. IANA Considerations
This document defines a URN NID registration that is to be entered
into the IANA registry of URN NIDs. It specifically requests the MRN
NID.
8. Normative References
[RFC1737] Sollins, K. and L. Masinter, "Functional Requirements for
Uniform Resource Names", RFC 1737, DOI 10.17487/RFC1737,
December 1994, .
[RFC2141] Moats, R., "URN Syntax", RFC 2141, DOI 10.17487/RFC2141,
May 1997, .
[RFC3406] Daigle, L., van Gulik, D., Iannella, R., and P. Faltstrom,
"Uniform Resource Names (URN) Namespace Definition
Mechanisms", RFC 3406, DOI 10.17487/RFC3406, October 2002,
.
[RFC5134] Mealling, M., "A Uniform Resource Name Namespace for the
EPCglobal Electronic Product Code (EPC) and Related
Standards", RFC 5134, DOI 10.17487/RFC5134, January 2008,
.
Author's Address
Kasper Nielsen
Danish Maritime Authority
Carl Jacobsens Vej 31
2500 Valby
Denmark
Email: kasperni@gmail.com
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