It is a crash post (as opposed to a crash course) on digital identities.
In the beginning, there was World Wide Web. WWW linked documents and devices together. As WWW usage grew in quantity, variety and quality, another type of Web started to emerge, called a Social Web, where people, concepts, groups and organizations started to network with each other. With that emerged a need for having a Digital Identity and a need for sharing data in a trusted manner.
Social Web Paper presents and explains a new protocol, called XDI (XRI Data Interchange), that would make the sharing of the above information possible.
Woah – What the heck is a XDI ?
One way to understand how we got to XDI is to go back to what we know about web addresses. We used to know them as URLs. URLs are a specific category of URI. The other form of URI is a URN, where in it described the name of an entity, not its location. Soon after URIs became prevelant, they were quickly becoming obsolete. Internet put new demands on a resource identifier, namely
- Internationalization
- need to identify a resource independent of network path, location, protocol etc.
The need for Internationalization led to the extension of URI into IRI (International Resource Identifier) that supported the full range of Unicode characters. The need for independent resource identification led to the development of XRI (Extensible Resource Identifier) and its sister service, XDI (XRI Data Interchange). XDI is defined as a
A generalized, extensible service for sharing, linking, and synchronizing data over the Internet and other data networks using XML documents and XRIs (Extensible Resource Identifiers)
That’s not all. XDI also uses a key “concept” called link contracts for sharing data. Pulling stuff using URLs to a browser is a one-way process. Link contracts are two-way tunnels that are flexible and extensible. Link contracts are aimed at solving information authentication, authorization, synchronization and other such security services that sit on top of the current web protocols, such as HTTP, FTP etc.
XRI, XDI and link contracts essentially enable the development of the Social Web model. XDI.ORG is developing public services (such as single sign-on, contact form, forwarding service, unified addressbook etc) based on this model.
I-names and I-numbers
i-names and i-numbers are one form of XRI - a open standard for digital identifiers. i-names are human friendly form of i-numbers. XRIs address the persistent addressing problem. It is an address that never changes no matter how much of a person’s information changes. XRIs are also backward compatible with DNS and IP addresses. These XRI-based i-names have a prefix “=” for personal names, a prefix of “@” for companies and communities and “+” for “concepts”. For e.g.
=rajeev.karamchedu – would represent me. You can never spam me here cause it is not an email address. It also requires some kind of verification. Check it out for yourself at http://public.2idi.com/=rajeev.karamchedu
@tigr (or @tigr.org) would be a i-name for my organization. The dot and the org is not required at all.
@tigr*IT*rajeev karamchedu – would be my i-name granted by my organization. The * symbol here is a de-limiter. So you can see, my i-name can be nested level style as well!
How can I get one of these i-names ?
Which brings me to the very reason I started writing this post – The public registration of i-names has begun TODAY. The XRI Global Registry Service (XRI GRS) is open to public effective 7 pm PDT June 20, 2006. Read more about it here.
Other websites to go read and get confused:
