Internet DRAFT - draft-bellifemine-urn-fipa
draft-bellifemine-urn-fipa
Network Working Group F. Bellifemine
Internet-Draft Telecom Italia Lab
Expires: 30 April 2002 I. Constantinescu
EPFL
S. Willmot
UPC
29 October 2002
A URN Namespace for FIPA
draft-bellifemine-urn-fipa-00
Status of this Memo
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all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026.
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Abstract
This is an application for assignment of the URN NID "FIPA" to be
used for identification of standard components published by the
Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents standards body [1] in the
area of Agent technology.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. Specification Template. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
3. Namespace Consideration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
4. Community Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
5. IANA Considerations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
6. Security Considerations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
7. Author Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . 6
8. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
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1. Introduction
The Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) was established
in 1996 in Geneva, Switzerland. FIPA is an international non-profit
association of companies and organizations dedicated to promoting the
industry of intelligent agents by openly developing specifications
supporting interoperability among agents and agent-based applications.
The core mission of the FIPA standards consortium is to facilitate the
interworking of agents and agent systems across multiple vendors'
platforms. Since its inception, FIPA has counted more than 60 member
companies from over 20 different countries worldwide.
The Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) publishes
technical specifications, schemas, diagrams and other documentation
related to the area of Agent technology
FIPA wishes to create and manage globally unique, persistent,
location-independent identifiers for these resources.
2. Specification Template
Namespace ID:
"fipa" requested
Registration Information:
Version 1
Date: 2002-20-28
Declared registrant of the namespace:
Name: FIPA Secretariat (J. Kelly)
E-mail: secretariat@fipa.org
Affiliation: Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA)
Address: c/o Me Jean-Pierre Jacquemoud
2, rue Bellot
CH-1206 Geneve
Declaration of structure:
The identifier has a hierarchical structure as follows:
urn:<assigned number>:{subspace-id1}:{subspace-id2}:...
subspace-ids can be any US-ASCII string compliant with URI
syntax and not contaning the ":" character. The subspaces
are used to divide the assigned namespace along
one or more logical schemes. Examples of such schemes are:
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* By standardisation area:
urn:fipa:language:acl
urn:fipa:ontology:management
* By technical committee:
urn:fipa:architecture:example:directory
urn:fipa:architecture:example:greenpolicy
Relevant ancillary documentation:
None.
Identifier uniqueness considerations:
Assignment of URNs in the requested namespace will be managed by
the FIPA Architecture Board (FAB) which will ensure that URNs
assigned in the requested namespace are unique.
Identifier persistence considerations:
FIPA is committed to maintaining the availability and
persistance of all resources identified by assigned URNs.
Process of identifier assignment:
Assignment of URNs in the requested namespace will be managed by
the FIPA Architecture Board (FAB) which is responsible for
approval of all specifications published by FIPA.
Process for identifier resolution:
FIPA will maintain published lists of assigned identifiers on
its web pages at http://www.fipa.org.
Rules for Lexical Equivalence:
URNs are lexically equivalent if they are lexically identical.
Conformance with URN Syntax:
No special considerations.
Validation mechanism:
None specified.
Scope:
Global.
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3. Namespace Considerations
As part of the consideration of the URN namespace issue FIPA has engaged
in a survey of existing and proposed URN NID schemes which might be used
instead of applying for a dedicated scheme. FIPA's specific requiements
are that the namespace should be:
- globally unique,
- persistent,
- location-independent
- relfect the logical structure of FIPA specifications (see section 3)
- be purely logical and without reference to "location" related
elements such as (in particular) domain names / DNS entries such
as URLs
- be managed by the FIPA organisation to ensure the integrity,
correctness and uniquness of the namespace.
The closest to the requirements identified by FIPA were the proposed
VOC [3] and TAG [2] schemes:
- In particular TAG could be used in conjunction with the domain name
"fipa.org" which FIPA has registered to generate unique identifiers.
However the problems with this scheme from FIPA's perspective are
(in order of importance):
* it has not yet (to our knowledge) been approved / accepted by
IESG or IANA (making it inapproriate for use in a standards
document)
* the labels generated related to the time date, owner of the label
but specify no particular semantics for the content/text
of the label which would be desirable to identify a hierarchy of
standards
* The uniqueness in the scheme is DNS based
- VOC provides a more logical structure for a logical hierarchy of
specifications but still presents the following problems:
* it has not yet (to our knowledge) been approved / accepted by
IESG or IANA making it inapproriate for use in a standards
document)
* The uniqueness in the scheme is DNS based
In both cases there is no clear authority for managing the correctness
of the namespace.
4. Community Considerations
FIPA standards address the area of interoperability between autonomous
software systems (agents) in open environments such as company intranets
or the Internet itself. Communication between such systems is highly
contigent on developers and the systems themselves being able to
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unambiguously identify which technology specifications (interaction
protocols, languages, domain descriptions and the like) are to be used
for particular purposes in any given interaction.
The use of a managed, unique namespace for FIPA specification components
would therefore be of great benefit:
- to the fipa standards process: providing unique labels for individual
specification components
- to developers implementing systems based on FIPA standards:
identifying which specifications are in use in a particular system,
allowing them to develop software able to flexibly distinguish between
different technologies used.
- to users of networks making use of FIPA technology (in whole or in
part): imporving the integrity and clarity of interactions
in the system, allowing them to precisely identify technology
requirements for interacting with any given software system
using FIPA technology.
Whilst the assignment of identifiers is managed by the FIPA Architecture
Board the application for identifiers is through the open FIPA standards
process - thus anybody following the process is entitled to request an
identifier for technologies they consider relevant to FIPA's work.
Final acceptance of any FIPA standard is contingent on a vote of the FIPA
membership. Although membership is not free (see [1] for details of costs),
it is open to any organisation with an interest in FIPA's work.
The initial plans for identifier resolution are to host a web page on
http://www.fipa.org to provide for resolution of identifiers FIPA will
also encourage third parties (fipa members and others) to host more
advance dereferencing service or to develop software to provide
dereferencing where these provide a correct and accurate reflection
of the namespace. FIPA itself may also engage in such activities.
5. IANA Considerations
This document includes a URN NID registration that is to be entered in
the IANA registry of URN NID's. To our knowledge the NID has not been
registered by anybody to date and meets the syntactic requirements to
be a formal NID rather than experimental (X-...) or other types of
informal NID layed out in RFC 2611.
6. Security Considerations
No special security considerations.
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7. Author Addresses
Fabio Bellifemine
Chair of the FIPA Architecture Board
Telecom Italia Lab
Email: Fabio.Bellifemine@TILAB.COM
Ion Constantinescu
EPFL
Email: ion.constantinescu@epfl.ch
Steven Willmott
Universitat Politˆcnica de Catalunya
Email: steve@lsi.upc.es
8. References
[1] Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents.
http://www.fipa.org/
[2] Kindberg, T. and Hawke, S. "The 'tag' URI scheme and URN
namespace", September 2001. IETF Internet Draft
draft-kindberg-tag-uri-04.txt
[3] Stickler, P. "The 'voc:' URI scheme for Vocabulary Terms and
Codes, January 2002,
http://www-nrc.nokia.com/sw/draft-pstickler-voc-00.html.
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