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3 Scope

The Akoma Ntoso naming convention identifies, in a unique way, all Akoma Ntoso concepts and resources on the Internet and, in general, all collections thereof. These principles and characteristics should be respected in the naming convention:

  1. MEANINGFULNESS : the name is a meaningful and logical description of the resource and not of its physical path.

  2. PERMANENCE : the name must be permanent and stable over time.

  3. INVARIANCE : the name must derive from invariant properties of the resource so as to provide some degree of certainty in obtaining the same name for the same resource regardless of process, tool and person.

FRBR concepts are used differently when referring to documents in a variety of situations. In each case it is important to use the IRI for the correct FRBR level of document. Here, we describe a few particularly frequent situations:

  1. Legislative references will most probably refer to Works --: acts referring to other acts do so regardless of the actual version, and references must be to something independent of all possible expressions, e.g., to the Work.

  2. The list of attachments and schedules belong to a specific Expression, so references to ExpressionComponents are specific to the Expression-level.

  3. The specific Manifestation that is the Akoma Ntoso XML format uses an XML-based syntax to refer to ExpressionComponents, and associate them to the corresponding ManifestationComponents containing the appropriate content. Therefore, within XML files the IRI of the ManifestationComponents must be used to refer to all components including the main document, all attachments, and all schedules.

  4. Multimedia fragments within an XML Manifestation (e.g., a drawing, a schema, or a map.) do not exist as independent ExpressionComponents as they are only a part of some ExpressionComponent (even when they are the only part). In fact, they are only ManifestationComponents and as such are referred to in < object> and < img> elements with the appropriate ManifestationComponent IRI. Even if the same multimedia content appears in different parts of the content of a Manifestation, each instance of that content must correspond to a different ManifestationComponent, and must be considered independently of the other.

  5. It is an Item-level decision, once ascertained that the content is exactly identical, to provide space-saving policies by storing only one copy of the multimedia content. This Item-level decision has no impact on references and names, which are still individually different from each other.

  6. Non-document concepts are referred to within the metadata and content of Akoma Ntoso documents. References are always performed in two steps: the first step ties the reference point in the document to an item in the References section using internal (and not standardized) identifiers; the second step ties the item in the reference section to the actual concept through the IRI of the concept as specified in this Naming Convention.

Since the most primary concepts in Akoma Ntoso are connected to documents, the main part of this section is devoted to detailing the IRIs of document-related concepts, and in particular Works, Expressions, and Manifestations. Items are, by definition, outside of the scope of this standard and are only briefly described. The final part of the section provides an IRI-based naming mechanism for non-document entities (as well as for document entities when they are handled in a similar way to non-document entities).