URNs

A quick note on URNs

A URN (Uniform Resource Name) is a standard format for identifying online resources. They are used throughout Trovi to represent various forms of data. A URN is a string in the format of urn:<nid>:<nss>. nid stands for "namespace identifier," and nss stands for "namespace-specific string." The NID is a single word which represents the entity which created the URN. NIDs are officially registered with IANA, but in theory, they can be anything.

Trovi has an unofficial NID of trovi. Anything not belonging to an official namespace will use the trovi NID. So, for example, a Chameleon Cloud user URN will be formatted urn:trovi:user:chameleon:<username>, because Chameleon Cloud does not have an official NID.

The only official NIDs we use are ietf, which are used in TokenGrant requests, and globus, which may appear in linked resources in Artifact Versions.