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A comment on Ask HN: Why are URNs not more popular?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Why are URNs not more popular? by PaulHoule on Friday January 06, 2023 @11:29AM (#34276772)
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.

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Re:Ask HN: Why are URNs not more popular? by cratermoon on Friday January 06, 2023 @12:34PM (#34277945)
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.

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Re:Ask HN: Why are URNs not more popular? by duskwuff on Friday January 06, 2023 @10:12PM (#34284751)
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.

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Re:Ask HN: Why are URNs not more popular? by pbhjpbhj on Saturday January 07, 2023 @10:00AM (#34288546)
That's a very creative way to say "I don't like your taxonomy". Serious commitment to the put-down.
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