RE: Personal URI?

The political ramifications of identifying people uniquely in the physical
world are even more significant when dealing with peoples' identities on the
internet.
Surely the problem does not find its solution in developing some kind of
global system for uniquely identifying people (or indeed resources
generally).  The solution for identifying people as resources comes from
treating them as resources.  By defining a local name for that
person/resource you can then scope the name with a globally unique namespace
which identifies which definition of that resource is the valid one.

For example, if I have a friend called John Smith, and I have a unique
namespace address called http://fictionalsite.com, I can identify my friend
by using the standard namespaceprefix:localname convention.  The resource
that this points to would identify John Smith as my friend, and give
geographical and temporal locations.  This would mean that if he changed his
name or emigrated, the unique identifier would still be valid, as he would
be still have been John Smith at that time and at that place.

This way I can treat him the same way I would any other resource.


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-----Original Message-----
From: Sampo Syreeni [mailto:decoy@iki.fi]
Sent: 07 August 2002 09:57
To: Peter Bruhn Andersen
Cc: RDF-interest
Subject: RE: Personal URI?



On 2002-08-06, Peter Bruhn Andersen uttered to RDF-interest:

>I'm living in Denmark where we all have a unique "personal
>identification number" (PIN) and I did have some ideas about using the
>PIN as a URN.

It's the same throughout the Nordic countries, and I think such systems
are place in various European contries as well. US obviously doesn't have
it, and it will be a major political issue if one is instantiated.
Still, PINs are useful, and building a single namespace of PINs doesn't
seem like much of a problem. It's much like the way international account
numbers work, nowadays.

My idea was urn:pin:fin:1978:080978-0173. Country, first year of validity
and whatever the actual PIN is. Since each country has its own numbering
system, we will have to label by country code. Most PIN schemes are
constructed with compactness in mind, so they will wrap from time to time.
Hence, label by the year of issuance. Then the actual number. We might
think about squeezing out the redundancy (e.g.  "78" in the above is a
birthyear, "-" indicates the century and "3" is a checkdigit), but I don't
think this is actually worth the trouble.

>The PIN itself is not enough but the risk makes a majority of people
>unwilling to share it publicly.

<politics>Which is precisely why people should share any such semi-secure
numbers as widely as possible. To dilute their significance.</politics>

>The PIN is only given to people in Denmark. I would like to see a globally
>useful solution.

I cannot see why arbitrary URN's couldn't be used in those cases. I've
already given myself a tag-URI, but using a PIN one instead/in addition to
that would be nice, when possible.
--
Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:decoy@iki.fi, tel:+358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front
openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2



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Received on Wednesday, 7 August 2002 06:50:28 UTC