Speaking for a moment while wearing my software engineer's hat, some advantages are:

1) A uniform form for identifiers in managed data. Knowing that the identifiers in our data will appear as URIs allows us to make low-level assumptions about indexing and validation that aren't available over generic strings, leading to tools with better performance at lower cost.

2) A much shorter road to creating "resolvability" for those identifiers that lack it. Creating, managing, and sharing a resolution mechanism for some particular kind of URN is much more straightforward than creating such a mechanism for generic strings.

---
A. Soroka
The University of Virginia Library

On Jul 17, 2014, at 4:45 PM, "Denenberg, Ray" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> What would be the benefit of representing an isbn as a urn if it doesn't resolve?
>
> Ray
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative Forum
>> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Stuart Yeates
>> Sent: Thursday, July 17, 2014 4:34 PM
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: [BIBFRAME] BibFrame and Linked Data: Identifiers
>>
>> On 07/17/2014 09:39 AM, Denenberg, Ray wrote:
>>> I think the advice is:
>>>
>>> (1) don't use a URI to identify a bf:Identifier. Treat it as a blank node.
>>>
>>> (2) Only a non-URI identifier (e.g. isbn) should be treated a
>>> bf:Identifier. (I.e. a URI should not be treated as a bf:Identifer.
>>> Thus the property bf:uri should be eliminated.)
>>>
>>> I think there is consensus on this, someone correct me if I’m wrong.
>>
>> In real systems, won't ISBNs be represented as URNs in the namespace
>> URN:ISBN:... as defined by http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3187.txt ?
>>
>> Are there really any identifiers that we care that aren't already mapped to
>> URNs? If yes, isn't the solution to map them to URNs?
>>
>> cheers
>> stuart