urn:geant Uniform Resource Name (URN)


DANTE administers a Uniform Resource Name (URN) namespace, supporting the assignment of unique, global, persistent names to various kinds of resources by the GÉANT community and its delegates. The Namespace Identifier (NID) of the namespace is "urn:geant". This URN was selected deliberately without references to a specific GÉANT project number (e.g. GN3plus), to conform with the URN requirement for long-term persistency.

RFC 4926 defines the "urn:geant" namespace and describes the procedures and policies governing its use.

URN-Related Resources

  • RFC 3406, "Uniform Resource Names (URN) Namespace Definition Mechanisms", describes how URN namespaces are registered.

  • RFC 2141, "URN Syntax", defines the syntax of URNs.

  • The IANA URN Namespace Registry page lists all currently registered URN Namespaces.

Information for Entities Requesting a Delegated Namespace

Some urn:geant namespaces are administered by DANTE, on behalf of GÉANT and related projects, while other namespaces are delegated to other organisations or project activities, to be administered by them. Representatives of organisations or project activities interested in registering a urn:geant namespace should first read RFC 4926, and consider the following:

  • DANTE operates the urn:geant Registry in support of its mission of promoting standardisation and interoperability in middleware for the research and education networking community. DANTE is pleased to consider requests consistent with that mission, and reserves the right to deny inappropriate requests.

  • Stability is a key element of URN-based naming. Organisations and project activities operating urn:geant delegated namespaces agree to confirm their continued active management of their namespaces at least once a year. This includes keeping DANTE informed of changes in contact persons, etc. The primary contact should be in a decision-making role for the organisation or project activity and authorised to act in this capacity. The primary contact must be involved in the communication with DANTE regarding the registration.

  • DANTE prefers to directly delegate urn:geant namespaces to NRENs (the delegated namespace should be the full domain name of the NREN). Long-lasting activities not strictly bound to a single NREN can obtain a urn:geant namespace too. Universities or institutions that are customers of an NREN will be on the contrary encouraged to obtain urn:geant namespaces from their reference NREN. Entities or universities external to the GÉANT community, but in some way related to it, may receive a urn:geant namespace as well. However, DANTE will limit it to justified cases (e.g. the entity needs a namespace but don’t have the critical mass to get a level 1 namespace from IANA, and there are not other suitable level 1 namespaces).

  • Discoverability is another important element of URN-based naming. Entities managing urn:geant namespaces are strongly encouraged to maintain accurate information describing names they have registered in their delegated namespace, and to make them publicly available in a form similar to the urn:geant Registry.

  • Subspaces of delegated namespaces may be further delegated to other entities. urn:geant delegates are encouraged to follow the same principles and procedures used by GN3plus in managing their delegations.

You can contact DANTE through this website to Request urn:geant Namespace

A URI based registry is also available at http://www.geant.net/uri/