Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
urn:isbn:0-486-27557-4 (a book).
- Is an instance
urn:nbn:de:bsz:14-qucosa-123456 (a German national bibliography number).
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
https://example.org/paper.pdf is a URL, not a URN.
- Not an instance
A DOI in its HTTPS form (https://doi.org/...) is a URL even though it names persistently.
Editorial commentary
URNs are one of the three families of URIs alongside URLs and URCs in early IETF terminology. A URN does not by itself imply resolution: it names a resource but does not (necessarily) tell you where to get it. Namespaces are registered with IANA; common examples include urn:isbn:, urn:issn:, urn:uuid:, urn:nbn: (National Bibliography Number), urn:doi: (deprecated but historically used), and urn:lex:. National libraries, especially in Germany, Finland, and the Netherlands, use urn:nbn: prefixes at large scale.
References
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Also known as
Uniform Resource Name
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
<role vocab="credit"
vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="URN"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/urn" />{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "DefinedTerm",
"name": "URN",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/urn",
"description": "Uniform Resource Name (RFC 8141), a URI of the form urn:NID:NSS where NID is a registered Namespace Identifier and NSS is the namespace-specific string, intended to denote a resource persistently and independently of any particular resolution mechanism.",
"inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/the-persistent-identifier-ecosystem/",
"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/urn",
"sameAs": [
"Uniform Resource Name"
],
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
}
