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URN - Uniform Resource Name
URN's are one of my current favourite ideas. Generally late coming to the party, I've only been involved for the past year or so with them. However, they now form an integral part of most of my work (that is, the real stuff that pays me dollars to stay alive with).
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The concepts for URNs date back to almost the same time that Tim Berners-Lee decided to make HTML and the web server part of the dialy lexicon. He realised that URLs are very fixed. If you change the name of the server, you've probably just killed another 100 links to your page. Unless the person on the other end updates the URL to reflect the new location, you end up with it being broken and probably some pissed off readers.
On the other end of the scale, say you know the ISBN number of a book, but not the title or where it is located. Imagine walking into the Library of Congress with only this information and your job is to locate the physical book to read. Upon looking up the book, you find that it is not on the shelf, it has been missplaced somewhere else - frustrating isn't it. URNs are designed to solve all of these problems.
TBD
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I also have a Changes File that describes what's happened since the last release. I've got 0.7 pretty much wrapped up in testing (the last 3 months have been heavy testing at work) so expect that by early to mid September.
I've also done some writing on URNs and how to integrate multiple resolvers into a single unifying interface. These were written a little while ago now so they're a bit scratchy. However, they might be of use:
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