Re: Registrar

Michael Mealling (ccoprmm@oit.gatech.edu)
Mon, 12 Jul 93 2:04:49 EDT

Terry Allen said this:
> But there's still a problem with the number of URNs. The UC Berkeley
> library has 8 million volumes. Say each of those vols has 1,000
> paras, and each para gets a URN. That's 8 billion URNs. Can a
> server system deal with that volume? In a nutshell, does this
> idea of URNs scale?

Why would you need to give each para a URN? Just specify the URN of the
book/resource and give some kind of agreed upon byte count range as what
exactly you are talking about. Now if this resource gets used a lot and
becomes more of a resource by itself then you could give that specific
URN+byte count it's own corresponding unique URN. Why you would want to
is a topic for discussion but I could see the need arising.

For example, say I wanted to talk about the 2nd Ammendment to the U.S.
constitution directly I would talk about:

URN:Auth_ID:Consitution.Ammendments
URM:IAFA:en_US.iso88591::"ByteRange:323-450":::

(Note: Rob has pointed out that you really don't need the last 3 colons.
I'm probably going to take them out.)

-MM

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