URN Glossary

IANA

Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. See http://www.iana.org/.

FONZ

Functions of New Zealand. A controlled vocabulary list of terms for functions of government agencies incorporated into the NZ Government Locator Service (NZGLS).

Metalogue

Metalogue is the central electronic catalogue of information about government services and resources. Government agencies create and maintain the information in Metalogue. People wanting to find government services and resources will explore the Metalogue catalogue when they use the government web portal, which is its public interface.
Since May 2002 metadata creators and quality assurors from government organisations have been using Metalogue, the metadata collection and management tool, to describe their services and resources for the government portal. The number of services and resources in Metalogue is now in the thousands and growing daily.

Namespace

A means of identifying elements and attributes in an XML document by assigning them a two-part name with the first part being the namespace and the second part being the functional name. A namespace identifies a set of names to prevent confusion when multiple objects with identical functional names are taken from different sources and brought together in the same XML document. Namespaces typically reference a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) because each URI will be unique.

SONZ

Subjects of New Zealand. A controlled vocabulary list of terms for functions of government agencies incorporated into the NZ Government Locator Service (NZGLS).

URI

Uniform Resource Identifier. A character string used to identify a resource (such as a file) from anywhere on the Internet by type and location. The set of Uniform Resource Identifiers includes Uniform Resource Names (URNs) and Uniform Resource Locators (URLs).

The classical view is that an identifer type would be cast into one of two (or possibly more) classes. An identifier might specify the location of a resource (a URL) or its name (a URN) independent of location. Thus a URI was either a URL or a URN. There was discussion about generalizing this by addition of a discrete number of additional classes; for example, a URI might point to metadata rather than the resource itself, in which case the URI would be a URC (citation). URI space was thus viewed as partitioned into subspaces: URL and URN, and additional subspaces, to be defined.

Over time, the view became that an individual scheme does not need to be cast into one of a discrete set of URI types such as "URL", "URN", "URC", etc. Web-identifer schemes are in general URI schemes; a given URI scheme may define subspaces. Thus http: is a URI scheme. urn: is also a URI scheme; it defines subspaces, called "namespaces". For example, the set of URNs of the form urn:isbn:n-nn-nnnnnn-n is a URN namespace. (isbn is an URN namespace identifier. It is not a "URN scheme" nor a "URI scheme").

See URIs, URLs, and URNs: Clarifications and Recommendations 1.0 for details.

URN

Uniform Resource Name. A scheme for uniquely identifying resources that might be available on the Internet by name, without regard to where they are located. URNs include all Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) having the schemes urn:, fpi:, and path:; that is, those that are not Uniform Resource Locators (URLs).

XML

n. Acronym for eXtensible Markup Language, a condensed form of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language). XML lets Web developers and designers create customized tags that offer greater flexibility in organizing and presenting information than is possible with the older HTML document coding system. XML is defined as a language standard published by the W3C and supported by the industry. See World Wide Web Consortium for details.

See also: Definitions and Acronyms in the Request for Comment.