i-name

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
This article is about digital identifiers. For other uses, see Iname.

I-names are one form of an

human readable
XRIs intended to be as easy as possible for people to remember and use. For example, a personal i-name could be =Mary or =Mary.Jones. An organizational i-name could be @Acme or @Acme.Corporation.

Persistence

One problem XRIs are designed to solve is persistent addressing — how to maintain an address that does not need to change no matter how often the contact details of a person or organization change. XRIs accomplish this by adding a new

DNS naming layers used on the Internet today (as well as over other type of addresses, such as phone numbers or instant messaging addresses). Such an abstraction layer is not new — URNs (Uniform Resource Names) and other persistent identifier
architectures have the same effect. What's different about the XRI layer is that it offers a single uniform syntax and resolution protocol for two different types of identifiers:

I-names

I-names are identifiers resembling domain names, designed for simplicity and ease of use. Though typically long-lived, i-names may, like domain names, be transferred or reassigned to another resource by their owners. For example, a company that changes its corporate name could sell its old i-name to another company, while both companies could retain their original i-numbers. What most differentiates i-names from domain names is that in practice they will have a synonymous (equivalent) persistent i-number (below).

I-numbers

network routers
to process and resolve.

XRI syntax also allows i-names and i-numbers to be combined within the same XRI. So effectively the XRI layer supports both i-name and i-number

HTTP-based XRI resolution protocol can be used to resolve either an i-name or an i-number to an XRDS
document describing the target resource.

XRIs are backward-compatible with the DNS and IP addressing systems, so it is possible for domain names and IP addresses to be used as i-names (or, in rare cases, as i-numbers). Like DNS names, XRIs can also be "delegated", i.e., nested multiple levels deep, just like the directory names on a local computer file system. For example, a company can register a top-level (global) i-name for itself and then assign second- or lower-level (community) i-names to its divisions, employees, etc. Examples: 

=Mary.Jones*Henry
@Example.Corp*Ecuador*Quito

i-names are called unified digital addresses because they can be resolved using the

spam
from this i-name because it is not an email address. To resolve =Mary.Jones into an email address would first require Mary's permission, and such requests can be verified by i-brokers to make sure they are legitimate.

In addition to =names for people and @names for organizations, the third major type of i-names is +names for generic concepts. This is the XRI equivalent of a generic noun in the English language, for example, +flowers, +phone.number, or +table.of.contents. Generic +names are very useful in distributed data sharing because they can be used as XRI cross-references to specify the precise type of data to be shared. For example, =Mary.Jones/(+phone.number)/(+daytime) and @Acme/(+phone.number)/(+daytime) can be used to request Mary's and Acme's daytime phone numbers, respectively.

See also

References

  1. XRI
    Technical Committee (14 November 2005)

External links

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