Re: [External] Pop Quiz: Where do DIDs belong from an Enterprise Architecture perspective?

On Fri, Jan 17, 2025 at 12:16 AM Samuel Rinnetmäki <
samuel.rinnetmaki@findy.fi> wrote:

> We might get away with pet names - a system where I store your DID giving
> it an alias “Dan H” in my address book. However, pet names don’t work so
> well when we bring third parties and non-digital communication into the
> picture.
>
> Samuel raises a good point about pet names and third party communication.
Say that you call him SamR, and I call him Sam.  How do we know we're
talking about the same person?  What do you and I call him when we're
gossiping about him behind his back?  Say that you introduce Daniel to your
SamR, and I introduce him to my Sam.  How does Daniel know that it's the
same person?

The answer to all three questions is to compare DIDs, but that comparison
is better done by software than by eye.  Where does that software belong in
the stack?  In the messaging layer?  Left up to the application?  Somewhere
in between?

I built one system where the mapping was done by the application and
another where it was done in the messaging layer.  Doing the translation
once in the messaging layer required few to no application changes.  Doing
it in the application meant you could get the opaque identifier when you
needed it, such as when talking over the telephone, but two applications
might choose different pet names for the same opaque identifier.  I never
built one with a name service applications could use to do the mapping.
Maybe I should have.

--------------
Alan Karp


On Fri, Jan 17, 2025 at 12:16 AM Samuel Rinnetmäki <
samuel.rinnetmaki@findy.fi> wrote:

> DIDs are points of control. We talk about "DID controllers". If a user has
> points of control but doesn't know she has them, in what sense(s) is she
> really in control? Pet names make points of control tractable from a human
> memory perspective, but if the mental model of a user doesn't have a place
> for the control point that they name, do we truly understand what we are
> accomplishing? Do we need to? How does this relate to sovereignty?
>
> E-mail address is a point of control. As a user, you can share your
> address daniel.hardman@gmail.com with me without knowing that the MX
> records of gmail.com point to 142.251.167.26 (and other IP addresses).
>
>  Web domain is a point of control. Many people can host content on their
> web site and publish the URL addresses of their pages without knowing the
> IP address the server is hosted on.
>
> DNS provides a public mapping between (human readable) domain names and IP
> addresses. Since DID addresses may be even more complex and hard to grasp
> than IP addresses, there might be a need for a DNS-like system for DIDs.
>
> We might get away with pet names - a system where I store your DID giving
> it an alias “Dan H” in my address book. However, pet names don’t work so
> well when we bring third parties and non-digital communication into the
> picture.
>
> To answer Michael’s original question about the domain of DIDs, a DID is a
> (technical) attribute of an entity that usually belongs to the Business
> domain. (Applications and hardware devices might have DIDs, too.) Taking an
> attribute (especially an identifying attribute) from an entity and moving
> it to another domain easily leads to more confusion than clarity.
>
> Of course, you might create models where persons are in the Business
> domain, their e-mail applications (including e-mail addresses) are in the
> Application domain and the servers running those applications (identified
> by IP addresses) are in the Technology domain. This model kind of works for
> gmail addresses etc. (your gmail address only identifies your email
> “application" provided by Google) but is quite misleading if you consider
> e-mail addresses you really own yourself and can point to any provider. It
> would be better to model the email address as an attribute of a person.
>
> A hostname can be used to identify an organization. (There are other uses,
> too.) Since DNS provides a mapping between IP addresses and hostnames, and
> this mapping can change, it is reasonable to model the hostname as an
> identifier of an organization and the IP address as an identifier of a
> server hosting the organization’s website (or mail servers etc.).
>
> If we had a DNS-like system providing a mapping between DIDs and their
> human-readable counterparts, we might model the human-readables as the
> attributes of actors and DIDs as attributes of technology (like IP
> addresses). But since we don’t have that mapping and the purpose of DIDs is
> not to identify servers (like IP addresses), I claim that DIDs belong to
> the domain where the objects they identify belong to. Personal and
> organizational DIDs belong to the Business domain. If there is a DID for an
> application, that DID belongs to the Application domain.
>
> All models are wrong, but some are useful.
> Samuel
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