It does have that "Borges Encyclopedia" character where a leaf close to the root urn:uuid: lets the community assign a unique id to every Iron atom in an Iron filing.

A person like Shirky would appreciate systems that let you reify subjects by coining unique identifiers and to not have to buy into any hierarchy at all.

If you look at the registry of URN prefixes

https://www.iana.org/assignments/uri-schemes/uri-schemes.xht...

note that most of them come across as application specific such as "jabber", "mailto", "secondlife" or "ms-access" or "ethereum" or are related to computers and networking such as "view-source", "udp", "ldap", etc. You have to dig a few levels deep to find the great namespaces for ISO standards,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_identifier

and all that. Would be nice to have a road map.

How have I not heard of "Borges Encyclopedia" before? Thank you for pointing me this.

And I 100% agree with the idea of the reification of subjects without buying into a formal hierarchy. As long as the system gets the right ideas into the heads of the right people, it's workable.

The specific reference is to the essay "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins", in which Borges likens an taxonomy proposed by Wilkins to a (almost certainly fictitious) Chinese encyclopedia which groups animals into fourteen categories:

> (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in the present classification, (i) those that tremble as if they are mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that look like flies from a long way off.

That's a very creative way to say "I don't like your taxonomy". Serious commitment to the put-down.

I don't really want to classify objects.

I want to refer to a registration in a registry. Objects can of course be regidtered many places for many reasons but that is not my concern here.

As long as I can serialize the tuple (registry-somone-made, id-in-that-registry) in a standard and readable way that would be a huge step forward

Thanks for that explanation. My first guess that it was an analogy to the Library of Babel and I was able to convince myself that made sense.

> I want to refer to a registration in a registry.

But that's not the question you posed in the original post. You asked about URNs, and the URN registry imposes a taxonomy. You're wanting a registry of identifiers classified by country and type. That's a taxonomy.

Why depend on someone else's registry? Make your own, don't worry about taxonomy, and use it.