Re: Comments on Section 3

On Mon, 14 Apr 2003, Kevin Smathers wrote:

> I think you are actually describing a search problem, not a naming
> problem.

I specifically wanted to focus on the distributed naming problem, not the
naming authority search problem;  If it requires a search, then it isn't a
distributed naming scheme.

On this list, David suggested one way that two parties can independently
come up with names for a given resource even though they don't have a
network connection or search capability, and that is the MD5 hash of a
collection of bits.  This only applies to static resources that are, in
some sense, entirely bits.  Still, there are a lot of interesting
resources that could be viewed this way, including audio CDs, DVDs,
PDF-published works and less formally email messages and digital
photographs. Dynamic content and non-digital resources, like the The
Effiel Tower, cannot be named in this way.

> The names can be relatively arbitrary if you have a way to search for
> the owner of record ...

While I was throwing out distributed naming as food for though, I think
that in the SIMILE scenarios, naming authority discovery/search is more
important than distributed naming.  It seems to me that naming discovery
is just a special case of schema discovery --- "I have a bunch of things
and I want to find a unique but *shared* name for them". The scenario I
envision here would be that of a photographer who wanted to catalog photos
of downtown Boston and needs to find a robust name for "Boston".  Perhaps
this scheme would be suggested/enforced by the schema choosen, or perhaps
not.

Nick Matsakis