Re:Ask HN: Why are URNs not more popular?
by andylynch on Saturday January 07, 2023 @07:41AM
(#34287533)
The closest thing to a current ‘official’ way to do this internationally is probably ISO 17442 Legal Entity Identifiers, originating in the financial services industry; part of this is even more directly relevant to you in that this includes a global list of registration authorities [1] which are maintained as an integral part of the LEI system (LEIs generally are very helpful in dealing with international company data, where they are registered, not least because they are very reliable, and explicitly freely-available data!). The nearest alternative (proprietary, but larger dataset ) are DUNS numbers.
[1] https://www.gleif.org/en/about-lei/code-lists/gleif-registra...
If I want to refer to a phone number, that has an international standard (msisdn), so that problem is solved really. But not so for bank accounts or business registration numbers, or NINs.
I think I have ended up with simply saving (scheme, id), where scheme names the registry in which ID is registered (e.g., for a business, or a bank account, etc). But, I have to make up our own names for "scheme" for each supported registry.
Interopability isn't really a requirement. It works fine to self-invent how to refer to an ID in a registry but it also feels odd, like, someone else should have solved this already...