XRI: Implication following from ' proxy' equivalence.

Hello Drummond,

[archiving in www-archive@w3.org (a public archive) for ease of future reference]

Following our recent meeting I have just realised something about the direction we were coming round to that may need some thought.

I believed that a strong principle for Tim and the TAG remains decentralisation and that the fewer points of centralisation the better. In that regard, DNS a centralised naming system that is pivotal to the internet and hence the web. Once folks have their own domain name they can (roughly speaking) mint sub-domain names to their hearts content.

By and large anyone that has a DNS domain name can mint and deploy http: scheme URIs without reference to another party.

>From a TAG pov, I believe that that would be seen as a desirable characteristic of XRIs... that there are no (signifcant) commercial barriers to anyone being able to mint an XRI of their own - eg. so (to pick an example) Boeing could decide that XRI were for then create them to their hearts content.

So... during our meeting you explained that the following are intented to be synonym:

        http://xrt.net/=jbradley
        http://boeing.com.xri.net/=jbradley


Infact:

        http://{anySubdomain}.xri.net/<specificXRIShortName>  are all synonyms for http://xri.net/<specificXRIShortName>

What did not occur to me at the time of our discussion was that this induces a need for a centralised registry of <specificXRIShortNames>

eg. so it is not the case that http://boeing.com.xri.net/=jsmith could be some person at Boeing where Boeing handled the registration of that name and that the person referenced might be different from the person referenced by http://xri.net/=jsmith.


At the time of our meeting, I missed the significance of this distinction. The .xri.net subdomains (or .xri or whatever) give the syntactic marker that indicates an identifier as an XRI, however, I think that it had been my perception then that some organisation, say boeing, would then be able to administer XRI issued under their own subdomain (say http://boeing.com.xri.net).

However, I now think that that is not what is intended. What is intended that, say, John Smith at boeing might be assigned a short XRI identifier of @boeing*People*JohnSmith (forgive any clumsyness with the syntax - but I think the intent is clear) such that all http://{anySubdomain}.xri.net/@boeing*People*JohnSmith are synonyms for http://xri.net/@boeing*People*JohnSmith. Maybe that's ok. The indirecetion throug @boeing may be perceived as giving boeing (or anyone else) sufficient freedom to create names within their own authority, but I think it is a point worth bringing out in the discussion when it surfaces.

The question really is about the implications that follow from all XRI proxies (if that how we think of the http: URI authority part) being equivalent.

I hope I've made some sense above.

Regards

Stuart
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Received on Wednesday, 15 October 2008 09:43:28 UTC