A Uniform Resource Name (URN) Namespace for Digital Nation Pakistan (DNP)

Introduction The Pakistan Digital Authority (PDA) is a federal statutory body of the Government of Pakistan, established under the Digital Nation Pakistan Act, 2025 . Its statutory functions include the specification of national standards for digital public infrastructure, the coordination of digitalisation across federal and provincial government entities, and the issuance of the National Digital Masterplan and its constituent sectoral plans. In discharging those functions PDA issues a growing corpus of normative documents. Instruments in this corpus are cited by federal and provincial government entities, by regulated private-sector participants in Pakistan's digital economy, by procurement and audit processes, by academic and policy researchers, and by international development partners. Citations to these instruments are expected to remain resolvable and unambiguous over periods measured in decades. At present those instruments are cited by HTTP URI. Experience in Pakistan and elsewhere shows that government HTTP URIs are not durable at that timescale: they change when hosting arrangements change, when content management systems are replaced, when organisational units are renamed or merged, and when domain naming conventions are revised. Citations in printed statutory instruments, in signed contracts and in the published academic record cannot be revised when this happens. The resulting reference decay degrades the evidentiary value of the corpus. A URN namespace addresses this by separating the identity of an instrument from its location. This document defines such a namespace, specifies the syntax and assignment rules for names within it, and requests registration of the Namespace Identifier (NID) "dnp" as a formal URN namespace under .

Terminology The terms "URN", "NID", "NSS", "assigned-name", "r-component", "q-component" and "f-component" are used as defined in . The following additional terms are used in this document:

instrument:: A discrete normative or authoritative publication issued under the DNP programme, considered as a continuing intellectual work independent of any particular edition of it.
edition:: A specific, fixed and immutable published state of an instrument, as approved and released on a particular date.
the Register:: The authoritative record of names assigned within this URN namespace, maintained by PDA as described in .

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14 when, and only when, they appear in all capitals, as shown here.

What This Namespace Does Not Cover The scope of this namespace is deliberately narrower than the full range of Government of Pakistan publications. In particular:

Names in this namespace MUST NOT be assigned to primary legislation of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Authority over the authoritative text of Acts of Parliament rests with organs of the State other than PDA. The "lex" namespace is the appropriate vehicle for legal norms and PDA does not seek to displace it.
Names in this namespace MUST NOT be assigned to natural persons, to legal persons, to individual transactions, or to any resource whose representation contains personal data. See .
Operational records, case files, correspondence and internal working documents of PDA are outside scope. The namespace identifies published instruments only.

URN Namespace Definition and Registration Template The following registration template conforms to Appendix A of . Sections 3 through 6 of this document expand on the Syntax, Assignment, Security and Privacy, and Resolution entries of the template and are normative for them.

Namespace Identifier:: dnp
Version:: 1
Date:: 2026-08-05
Registrant:: Pakistan Digital Authority (PDA)
Government of Pakistan
4th Floor, 5-A Constitution Avenue, Sector F-5/1
Islamabad, Pakistan Designated contact: Hira Sohail, Director of Partnerships & Stakeholder Engagement
Email: director-se@pda.gov.pk
Telephone: +92 302 516 1211
Web: https://pda.gov.pk/ PDA is a federal statutory body established under the Digital Nation Pakistan Act, 2025 , with statutory responsibility for national digital standards. PDA is not requesting the fast-track registration procedure described in Section 6.3 of ; this registration is submitted under the Expert Review procedure of Section 6.2.
Purpose:: Names in this namespace identify normative and authoritative instruments published under the Digital Nation Pakistan programme. The classes of instrument covered are enumerated in and include national digital policies, frameworks, technical standards, reference architectures, specifications, implementation guidelines, data schemas, application programming interface contracts, public registries, published datasets and formal directives issued by PDA. The primary community of use is the Government of Pakistan, comprising federal ministries and divisions, provincial governments and their attached departments and autonomous bodies, together with the private-sector entities that build on or must conform to Pakistan's digital public infrastructure. Secondary communities of use include international standards bodies, multilateral development institutions with programmes in Pakistan, comparative policy researchers, the archival and library sector, and implementers in other jurisdictions who reference Pakistani specifications when designing interoperable systems. The Internet community at large benefits in three respects. First, the corpus is published openly and is of direct interest to the growing body of practice on digital public infrastructure, in which Pakistan is an adopter and a contributor; stable citation makes that corpus usable in the scholarly and technical record. Second, Pakistani specifications describe interfaces that non-Pakistani systems interoperate with, so unambiguous identification of a specific edition of a specification has direct engineering value beyond Pakistan. Third, government publications are among the most frequent victims of reference decay, and a managed namespace with an explicit non-reassignment commitment reduces that decay for a corpus that would otherwise be cited by ordinary HTTP URI alone. This namespace complements rather than duplicates existing namespaces. The "lex" namespace identifies legal norms and is the appropriate identifier system for Pakistani legislation, which this namespace does not cover. The "iso" and "ietf" namespaces identify the outputs of those bodies; where a DNP instrument profiles or adopts such an output it cites it in the native namespace rather than reassigning it. Where an instrument is also assigned a Digital Object Identifier or, in future, a Pakistani National Bibliography Number, those assignments coexist with the URN and are recorded as equivalences in the Register; a single resource bearing more than one identifier is expressly contemplated by Section 5 of . Software that can make use of these names includes citation managers and reference-checking tools; document management and records systems within government; conformance and procurement tooling that must assert which edition of a standard a system was built against; long-term digital preservation systems in the national archival and library sector; and standards-registry software operated by PDA. Resolution services are described in . Neither this namespace nor its definition is expected to become a constituent part of a standard developed in the IETF. The namespace is expected to be referenced normatively by standards issued by PDA itself.
Syntax:: See .
Assignment:: See .
Security and Privacy:: See .
Interoperability:: See .
Resolution:: See .
Documentation:: This document. A stable specification maintained by PDA is published at https://standards.dnp.gov.pk/ under the PDA document nomenclature framework and is kept synchronised with this registration.
Additional Information:: See .
Revision Information:: None. This is the initial registration.

Syntax

Formal Syntax Names in this namespace conform to the URN syntax of Section 2 of . The Namespace Specific String (NSS) is further constrained as follows, using the Augmented Backus-Naur Form of . The rules ALPHA and DIGIT are imported from . The NSS contains at most two colon characters and consists of exactly two or three fields. No structure is implied by the colon beyond the field division defined above; consistent with Section 5 of , the NSS is to be read as a whole and this section is the sole source of its internal structure. Every character permitted by the grammar above is a member of the "pchar" production of and requires no percent-encoding. Names in this namespace therefore never contain percent-encoded octets. A candidate name containing a percent character is malformed and MUST be rejected rather than decoded. Characters outside the ASCII range MUST NOT appear in names in this namespace. PDA publishes in Urdu and in English and publishes titles and descriptive metadata in both; those titles are metadata carried in the Register and in resolution responses, and are not part of the identifier. This restriction follows the recommendation in Section 2.2 of that URN namespaces avoid non-ASCII characters unless the nature of the namespace makes them necessary, and it eliminates a class of homograph confusion described in .

The class Field The class field states the kind of instrument identified. The initial set of registered classes is: Initially Registered Classes

class	Kind of instrument
policy	A national digital policy instrument approved through the applicable governmental process
framework	A structuring instrument that organises a domain without itself imposing conformance requirements
standard	A technical standard against which conformance can be asserted and assessed
architecture	A reference architecture
specification	A functional or technical specification for a system, service or component
guideline	Non-binding implementation guidance
directive	A formal instruction issued by PDA under its statutory powers
schema	A data schema, vocabulary or code list
api	An application programming interface contract
registry	A public registry maintained by or on behalf of PDA
dataset	A published dataset
masterplan	The National Digital Masterplan and its constituent sectoral plans
publication	A report, study or other authoritative publication not falling within another class

The set of classes is closed at any given time and is extended only by amendment to the PDA specification referenced in the Documentation entry of . A class, once registered, MUST NOT be withdrawn or redefined; a class that ceases to be used for new assignments is marked closed in the Register and the names already assigned within it remain valid. Adding a class does not require revision of this URN namespace registration, because it does not alter the syntax, the assignment authority or the persistence commitment. PDA publishes the current set of classes at the location given in the Documentation entry.

The local-id Field The local-id field carries the identifier already assigned to the instrument under PDA's internal document nomenclature framework, transformed to lower case. Where an instrument has no such identifier, local-id is a mnemonic assigned by PDA at the time of first publication. In either case local-id is unique within its class and, once assigned, is never reassigned. local-id identifies the instrument as a continuing work. It does not, and is not intended to, encode the subject matter, the issuing organisational unit, the publication date or the status of the instrument. Consumers MUST NOT parse local-id for such information; that information is metadata and is obtained from the Register.

The edition Field and the Work/Edition Distinction The optional edition field distinguishes two things that are deliberately identified separately, and understanding this distinction is necessary to using the namespace correctly. A name without an edition field identifies the instrument as a continuing work: the standard, the policy or the framework as an institutional object that persists across successive revisions. Such a name is appropriate where the citing party means "this instrument, whichever edition is current" -- for example in a statutory instrument that requires conformance with a named standard as amended from time to time. A name with an edition field identifies one fixed, immutable published state of that instrument. Such a name is appropriate where the citing party means "this exact text" -- for example in a conformance assertion, a procurement specification, a signed contract, or a scholarly citation. Both forms are permanent and neither is ever reassigned. The work-level name continues to identify the same work even after every edition of it has been superseded, and continues to identify it after the work is withdrawn from current effect; withdrawal is a change of status recorded in the Register, not a change of identity. An edition-level name continues to identify the same fixed text indefinitely, including after that text has been superseded. Neither form is ever deleted from the Register. The two forms are distinct names identifying distinct resources and are not URN-equivalent to one another. Resolution behaviour for each form is specified in . Two edition forms are provided. The ver-form is used where the instrument carries an editorial version number, which is the normal case for standards and specifications. The date-form, expressed as a calendar date in the Gregorian calendar in the format YYYY-MM-DD, is used where the instrument is identified by its date of issue rather than by a version number, which is the normal case for directives and for datasets published on a recurring cycle. A given instrument uses one form or the other consistently throughout its life; the form in use for an instrument is recorded in the Register. Examples appear in .

URN-Equivalence Two names in this namespace are URN-equivalent if they are URN-equivalent under the procedure in Section 3.1 of after additionally applying ASCII case folding to the entire NSS. That is, in addition to the case-insensitivity of the "urn" scheme and of the NID that Section 3.1 already provides, the NSS in this namespace is case-insensitive. The names

urn:dnp:standard:dnp-d.002:v1
urn:dnp:standard:DNP-D.002:v1
URN:DNP:STANDARD:DNP-D.002:V1

are URN-equivalent to one another. Because names in this namespace never contain percent-encoded octets (), the percent-encoding provisions of Section 3.1 of have no effect here. No further equivalence rules are defined. In particular, hyphens and full stops within local-id are significant and are not elided for comparison purposes. This rule has the effect only of eliminating false negatives relative to the base procedure, as required by Section 3.1 of . It does not cause any two names to be treated as distinct that the base procedure treats as URN-equivalent. PDA assigns names in lower case, and the lower-case form is canonical. Applications SHOULD present names in the canonical form.

r-components, q-components and f-components This namespace defines no r-component semantics. Consistent with the guidance in Section 2.3.1 of , PDA does not use r-components and will not do so before their semantics are standardised. A PDA resolver presented with an r-component MUST ignore it and resolve the assigned-name. This namespace defines no q-component semantics of its own. Where a name resolves to a URI that is a locator, a q-component is handled as described in Section 2.3.2 of . PDA resolution does not require q-component information and MUST NOT be designed to depend on it. f-components are interpreted per Section 2.3.3 of , that is, according to the media type of the retrieved representation. Where PDA publishes an instrument in HTML, it SHOULD provide stable fragment identifiers corresponding to the numbered clauses of the instrument, so that a clause-level citation such as urn:dnp:standard:dnp-x.001:v2#clause-4.3 is durable. Such fragment identifiers are a property of the published representation, not of the namespace, and are not taken into account for URN-equivalence.

Examples The following illustrate the syntax. They are not assignments.

urn:dnp:standard:dnp-x.001 -- a nomenclature standard, as a continuing work
urn:dnp:standard:dnp-x.001:v2 -- the second edition of that standard, as a fixed text
urn:dnp:architecture:dnp-d.002:v1 -- the first edition of a reference architecture
urn:dnp:masterplan:ndmp-2026-2035 -- the National Digital Masterplan as a work
urn:dnp:masterplan:ndmp-2026-2035:v1 -- its first published edition
urn:dnp:directive:pda-2026-014:2026-03-11 -- a directive identified by date of issue
urn:dnp:schema:person-name:v1 -- the first edition of a data schema
urn:dnp:api:consent:v2 -- the second edition of an API contract
urn:dnp:dataset:connectivity-index:2026-06-30 -- a dataset edition published on a recurring cycle

Assignment

Assignment Authority Assignment within this namespace is closed. Names are assigned solely by PDA, or by an entity acting under a written instrument of delegation issued by PDA. Assignment is not open to application by third parties and there is no procedure by which an external party may request that a name be assigned to a resource of its own. Delegation is contemplated because instruments within scope may be issued by federal or provincial entities under PDA's coordinating mandate. A delegation instrument specifies the classes and the local-id ranges within which the delegate may assign, and binds the delegate to the persistence commitment in . Delegations in force are listed in the Register. A delegation may be withdrawn; withdrawal has no effect on names already assigned under it, which remain valid and remain the responsibility of PDA.

Uniqueness Uniqueness is enforced by construction. PDA maintains a single authoritative Register of all assigned names. A name is brought into existence only by an entry in the Register, and the Register rejects any entry whose assigned-name is URN-equivalent, under , to an existing entry. Delegated assignment operates against the same Register and within non-overlapping allocations, so a delegate cannot create a collision with PDA or with another delegate. The Register records, for each name: the assigned-name; the instrument or edition identified; the date of assignment; the assigning entity; the current status; the current authoritative location or locations of the identified resource; a cryptographic digest of each edition-level resource as published; titles and descriptive metadata in English and Urdu; and any equivalent identifiers in other identifier systems.

Persistence and Non-Reassignment A name assigned within this namespace MUST NOT be reassigned to a different resource, and MUST NOT be withdrawn or deleted, under any circumstance. This holds where the identified instrument is superseded, repealed, withdrawn from effect, or found to have been issued in error; where the organisational unit that issued it is abolished or merged; and where the instrument is no longer published. In each case the fact is recorded as a status change in the Register and the name continues to identify what it has always identified. An error in an assignment is corrected by recording the error in the Register and, if necessary, assigning a new name. It is never corrected by reusing the erroneous name.

Institutional Continuity Section 5.1 of asks that it be clear how a namespace remains viable if the assigning organisation can no longer maintain it. PDA is a body created by primary legislation rather than by administrative order, and its dissolution or reconstitution would require an act of the legislature. Pakistani legislative practice on the reconstitution of statutory bodies provides for the devolution of the functions, assets and records of a dissolved body upon a successor or upon the Division concerned. Stewardship of this namespace and of the Register is a function within the meaning of that practice, and would devolve accordingly. PDA additionally undertakes the following, which do not depend on PDA's continued existence:

The Register is published in full as a machine-readable open dataset, refreshed on a regular cycle, so that a complete copy exists outside PDA's own systems at all times.
PDA deposits the Register and the published corpus with Pakistan's national depository institutions and offers the same deposit to international web-archiving initiatives, so that the identifier-to-resource binding survives independently of PDA's infrastructure.
If stewardship is transferred, PDA or its successor will submit a revised registration template under Section 6.2 of recording the change. Transfer of stewardship does not affect the validity of names already assigned.

Security and Privacy

Absence of Personal Data Names in this namespace are assigned only to published institutional instruments. A name MUST NOT be assigned to a natural person, to an identifier of a natural person, to an individual transaction or record, or to any resource whose representation contains personal data. This constraint is stated normatively because PDA's statutory mandate includes national digital identity and data exchange infrastructure, and because the persistence properties that make URNs attractive for institutional documents make them actively harmful for identifiers of people. A URN cannot be revoked, and the non-reassignment commitment in is incompatible with any right of erasure. Extending this namespace to cover personal or transactional data would require a new namespace registration with a materially different persistence model, and PDA does not propose one. The Register records the names of officers only in their institutional capacity, as the approving authority for an instrument, which is information already disclosed on the face of the published instrument.

Comparison and Confusion The case-insensitivity rule in introduces the general risks discussed in for identifiers compared under case folding. Those risks are bounded here: the NSS is restricted to ASCII letters, digits, hyphen and full stop, so ASCII case folding is locale-independent, involves no expansion or contraction of characters, and admits no Unicode confusables. The Turkish dotless-i problem does not arise because folding is defined over the ASCII range only. Implementations MUST perform case folding over the ASCII range only and MUST NOT apply locale-sensitive case mapping. A false positive in comparison could cause a system to treat a conformance assertion against one instrument as an assertion against another. Because the identified resources are public and the Register is published, such an error is detectable by inspection. Because the work-level and edition-level forms of a name are similar in appearance but identify different resources (), an implementation that truncates or elides the edition field will silently substitute a work-level citation for an edition-level one. Where the citation appears in a conformance or contractual context this changes its meaning. Implementations MUST NOT truncate names, and applications that display names SHOULD display them in full, consistent with Section 4.4 of .

Authenticity and Spoofing A name in this namespace asserts nothing about the authenticity of any document it may be attached to. A third party can place the string "urn:dnp:standard:..." on an unauthorised document as easily as it can place any other string. The Register, retrieved over an authenticated channel, is the sole authority for what a name identifies; the cryptographic digests it records for edition-level resources allow a retrieved document to be checked against the published text. Consistent with Section 8 of , the information in this registration is a declaration and should be treated as advisory.

Resolver Operation Where PDA operates a resolution service (), queries to that service reveal to PDA which instruments a given client is interested in, and, absent transport security, reveal the same to network observers. Because the corpus includes policy and regulatory instruments, that interest may be sensitive; a pattern of queries could indicate the direction of an entity's compliance work or of a researcher's enquiry. Accordingly the PDA resolver MUST be offered over HTTPS, MUST NOT require authentication, and MUST NOT require or set cookies. PDA retains resolver request logs only in aggregate form and only for capacity planning, and does not disclose individual query records. Directory harvesting is not a concern for this namespace: the Register is published in full and complete enumeration of the namespace is an intended feature rather than an attack.

Interoperability PDA is aware of the following potential sources of confusion and addresses each here rather than leaving it to be discovered later. The string "DNP". "DNP" is used as a corporate brand by at least one substantial commercial enterprise unconnected with Pakistan, which holds trademark registrations in that string in several jurisdictions and operates a brand top-level domain under it. "DNP" is also an established abbreviation in chemistry and in professional sport. PDA claims no association with any of these, and the registration of this NID neither asserts nor implies any right in the string outside the URN namespace registry. PDA has selected the string because it is the statutory short form of Digital Nation Pakistan, the programme established by the Act of the same name, and not for any associative value. PDA notes that a URN NID and a trademark occupy different registries with different scopes, that no resource identified in this namespace is a commercial good or service, and that Section 5.1 of leaves disputes over strings to the parties concerned. PDA will engage in good faith with any objection raised during Expert Review. Legal norms. The boundary with the "lex" namespace is set out in . Instruments in this namespace frequently cite Pakistani legislation; such citations use "lex" or the Gazette reference, not this namespace. An instrument issued by PDA under a statutory power is identified here as a directive; the statutory power itself is not. Bibliographic identifiers. Pakistan has no registered National Bibliography Number sub-namespace under at the time of writing. Should the national library register one and assign numbers to instruments in this corpus, the resulting names would coexist with names in this namespace and be recorded as equivalences in the Register. The same applies to Digital Object Identifiers, which PDA assigns to some publications through a DOI registration agency. Internal document codes. PDA's internal document nomenclature codes appear within local-id in transformed form (). Those codes exist and circulate outside the URN context, and readers may encounter a code in isolation. A bare code is not a URN and MUST NOT be treated as one; the transformation from code to local-id is defined in the PDA specification referenced in the Documentation entry of . The transformation is not in general reversible by inspection and implementations MUST NOT attempt to reverse it algorithmically. Character handling. Because names never contain percent-encoded octets or non-ASCII characters (), the encoding pitfalls that arise when pre-existing identifier systems are mapped into URN syntax do not arise here. Protocol slots. Consistent with Section 4.1 of , a name in this namespace is not a locator and SHOULD NOT be placed in a URI protocol slot whose defined semantics require dereferencing to a representation. It is appropriate in citation fields, metadata records, conformance declarations and provenance assertions.

Resolution Resolution is intended. PDA operates and undertakes to continue to operate a resolution service for names in this namespace. The service is offered over HTTPS at the endpoint https://urn.dnp.gov.pk/, operated by PDA under a Government of Pakistan domain. A client resolves a name by requesting the assigned-name as a path component of that endpoint, for example https://urn.dnp.gov.pk/urn:dnp:standard:dnp-x.001:v2. The endpoint is also recorded in the PDA specification referenced in the Documentation entry of ; should it ever change, the specification and this registration are revised, and names already assigned are unaffected. Resolution behaviour follows the work/edition distinction of :

A work-level name resolves to the current authoritative edition of the instrument where one is in force, and otherwise to a record describing the instrument and its editions.
An edition-level name resolves to that fixed edition, and continues to do so after it has been superseded. A superseded edition remains retrievable and is marked as superseded, with a reference to the edition that superseded it. PDA does not remove superseded editions from publication.

A client that requests a representation of the identified resource receives it, or a redirection to its current location. A client that requests metadata, by content negotiation, receives the Register record for the name, including status, provenance, digests and equivalent identifiers. Resolution of a syntactically valid name that has not been assigned is distinguishable from resolution of a name that has been assigned to an instrument that is no longer in force; the two are different conditions and are reported differently. Resolution is a convenience and is not constitutive. A name remains valid, and continues to identify what the Register says it identifies, irrespective of whether any resolver is reachable, and irrespective of whether the identified resource is currently retrievable. PDA does not at present operate a registration process for third-party publicly advertised resolution services for this namespace, and does not at present recommend any resolver other than its own. Should PDA establish such a process, the requirements for being publicly advertised will be published alongside the specification referenced in the Documentation entry, and this registration will be revised. Handling of r-components is specified in : PDA defines none, and its resolver ignores any that are presented.

Additional Information The Digital Nation Pakistan Act, 2025 establishes PDA and sets out its functions, including the specification of national digital standards and the coordination of digitalisation across government. The Act is the source of PDA's authority to issue the instruments identified in this namespace and of the institutional continuity described in . Registrations by national government bodies in this registry include those of the Federal Chancellery of the Republic of Austria and of New Zealand , and by national memory institutions including the National Archives of Finland. This registration follows the same pattern: a national public authority seeking durable identification of a defined corpus of official material, without any claim to a country-code-derived namespace. PDA notes that Section 5.1 of reserves strings of the form ALPHA ALPHA "-" for possible future country-code-based registration; this registration does not use, anticipate or depend on any such reservation.

IANA Considerations This document requests that IANA register the formal URN Namespace Identifier "dnp" in the "Formal URN Namespaces" registry, using the registration template in , in accordance with Section 6.2 of . This document makes no other request of IANA.

Security Considerations Security and privacy considerations for this namespace are set out in , in accordance with Section 6.4.4 of . General security considerations for URN namespaces are given in Section 8 of .