[Gzz] Re: urn-5 article

[Benja Fallenstein]

Tuomas Lukka wrote:

> > > in TODO? I think it might be a pretty good topic and could get 
> > > accepted,i.e.
> > > what it is, what's the reasoning behind it, how it's used by machines etc.
> > >
> > >      
> > You mean, talking about the idea that all user-meaningful "objects" 
> > (Ted's items...), like documents, paragraphs, vector graphics shapes 
> > etc. get a global identity the moment they're created, allowing to talk 
> > about them in a globally unique way? 
> >    
>
> Yes, well, basically, the main subject would be
>
>         "What's urn-5 good for?"

Ok.

> > That sounds interesting. Could 
> > relate this to the Semantic Web (how you're able to make RDF statements 
> > about these things, e.g. metadata). Talk about how it gets rid of 
> > context problems (the id stays the same when moving the object to a 
> > different document) and possibly, how this allows for Ted's 
> > transclusions and links (links can be implemented using RDF and RDF 
> > search engines, which are in development). Can then relate it to 
> > zzstructure (editing textual XML with these identifiers is possible, but 
> > no fun; with a structural editor, like a zzstructure client, the ids can 
> > remain hidden).
> >
> > Is that roughly what you've had in mind?
> >    
>
> Yes. Along with discussing the difference between this and urn:sha-1 really
> carefully.

(Between this and "identification schemes based on secure hashing, such 
as the (unregistered) Freenet URIs": urn:sha-1 is neither used nor 
registered nor in the process of being registered, so the most we could 
refer to it is as an idea someone has had at some point. A nit, I know, 
but important when publishing this.)

> > > Of course, the most difficult part would be to explain the background 
> > > material
> > > about everything possible.
> > >
> > >      
> > What do you mean, here?
> >    
>
> Well, in order for it to be a good academic article, we need to discuss
>
>         - URN
>         - freenet IDs
>         - DNS
>         - email addresses
>         - URLs
>         - IP addresses
>         - physical addresses
>         - JUST ABOUT ALL FORMS OF IDENTIFICATION THAT EVER HAS BEEN USED
>
> in an academically valid introduction.

Ah, ok. Other identifications to mention here:

- HTML anchors
- HTML/XML element ids
- relative URIs, fragment identifiers
- GNOME monikers

These are not globally unique, which is important to us because they're 
used in places where urn-5 could be used for unique identification.

Possible order of presentation:
- Globally unique ids and why you want to use them
- Places that don't use globally unique ids currently, and what you 
cannot do because of that
- The urn:urn-5 namespace
- how it works
- how it's different from hashing
- Caveat: Human readability/writability problems
- only in text editors, structure editors can handle ids internally
- Caveat: unlike relative identifiers, when you have an urn:urn-5 id, 
you don't automatically have any document/context it appears in
- you can have a central registry on a system containing those ids, if 
you want to perform lookups using them
- this kind of registry would allow RDF statements about identified 
objects to be resolved
- could use this to implement transclusions and links
- Conclusions

- Benjja