NID a first for New Zealand

New Zealand is the first country to apply for, and be granted, a country based Namespace Identifier (NID). Up until now, it has been only organizations and standards bodies that have applied for NIDs. International standards bodies do not yet assign 2-letter country codes (e.g. "NZ"), so the State Services Commission applied for and was granted "NZL". New Zealand URNs (Uniform Resource Name) will therefore start like:
"urn:nzl:...".

URNs are a form of Unique Resource Identifier. They allow you to give something a globally unique, location-neutral name. URNs typically consist of a number of colon-separated words, that uniquely identify a given object.

Many organizations (such as the IETF and OASIS) have applied for and obtained a unique Namespace Identifier. The NID allows an organization to uniquely identify objects because the first part of a URN consists of their NID.  This NID can be used to create unique names under which XML objects can be "filed". For example, an organization with the NID "acme" could file a given schema like:
"urn:acme:my:sample:schema:v1".
A subsequent version might be:
"urn:acme:my:sample:schema:v2".

Being granted the NID is just the beginning. Other jurisdictions have already indicated their interest in how New Zealand uses the new NID. Originally, a hierarchical URN structure based on FONZ and SONZ, the Functions of New Zealand (FONZ) and the Subjects of New Zealand (SONZ) thesauri, was proposed. A working group will be convened to decide on the exact format.