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RFC 3616
Network Working Group F. Bellifemine
Request for Comments: 3616 Telecom Italia Lab
Category: Informational I. Constantinescu
EPFL
S. Willmott
UPC
September 2003
A Uniform Resource Name (URN) Namespace for
Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA)
Status of this Memo
This memo provides information for the Internet community. It does
not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this
memo is unlimited.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2003). All Rights Reserved.
Abstract
This document describes a Uniform Resource Name Namespace
Identification (URN NID) for the Foundation for Intelligent Physical
Agents (FIPA). This URN NID will be used for identification of
standard components published by the FIPA standards body in the area
of Agent technology.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. Specification Template. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
3. Namespace Considerations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
4. Community Considerations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
5. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
6. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
7. References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
7.1. Normative References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
7.2. Informative References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
8. Authors' Addresses. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
9. Full Copyright Statement. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
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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.
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"
Registration Information:
Version 1
Date: 2002-02-28
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 containing the ":" character. The subspaces are used to
divide the assigned namespace along one or more logical schemes.
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Examples of such schemes are:
* By standardization 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 persistence
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.
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Scope:
Global.
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 requirements are that the namespace should be:
- Globally unique
- Persistent
- Location-independent
- Reflect 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/Domain Name System
(DNS) entries such as URLs
- Be managed by the FIPA organisation to ensure the integrity,
correctness and uniqueness of the namespace.
The closest to the requirements identified by FIPA were the proposed
Vocabulary (VOC) [4] and TAG [3] 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 inappropriate 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 inappropriate for use in a standards
document).
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RFC 3616 URN Namespace for FIPA September 2003
* 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 contingent on developers and the systems themselves
being able to 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): improving 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 [2] 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
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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
The IANA has registered formal URN namespace 14, to FIPA within the
IANA registry of URN NIDs.
6. Security Considerations
The FIPA URN Namespace ID shares the security considerations outlined
in RFC 3406 [1], but has no other known security considerations.
7. References
7.1. Normative References
[1] Daigle, L., van Gulik, D., Iannella, R. and P. Faltstrom,
"Uniform Resource Names (URN) Namespace Definition Mechanisms",
BCP 66, RFC 3406, October 2002.
7.2. Informative References
[2] Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents. http://www.fipa.org/
[3] Kindberg, T. and S. Hawke, "The 'tag' URI scheme and URN
namespace", Work in Progress, September 2001.
[4] Stickler, P., "The 'voc:' URI scheme for Vocabulary Terms and
Codes, Work in Progress, January 2002.
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8. Authors' 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 Polit/210cnica de Catalunya
EMail: steve@lsi.upc.es
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9. Full Copyright Statement
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2003). All Rights Reserved.
This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it
or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published
and distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any
kind, provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
included on all such copies and derivative works. However, this
document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing
the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other
Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of
developing Internet standards in which case the procedures for
copyrights defined in the Internet Standards process must be
followed, or as required to translate it into languages other than
English.
The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assignees.
This document and the information contained herein is provided on an
"AS IS" basis and THE INTERNET SOCIETY AND THE INTERNET ENGINEERING
TASK FORCE DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING
BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTY THAT THE USE OF THE INFORMATION
HEREIN WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
Acknowledgement
Funding for the RFC Editor function is currently provided by the
Internet Society.
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