What applications are there for naming?

Do six billion people need six billion domain names?

34 bit space of people

telephone number density > 1 (#ís not equal to lines)

obvious weíll need many more than 6 billion names

more like 600 billion?

Names generated by machines will swamp names generated by people

Is there a distinction between the number of names we need and infinity?

Bounded?

Six billion naming contexts?

Where do human cognitive bounds come in?

Entire telephone system needs to be online

Telephone numbers are names (of services, people)

Telephone numbers should be names, not numbers

Telephone number originally (and still) used for routing!

Providing names for any digital object over its lifetime

An object can have a long lifetime

Use names to abstract away changes in authority(?)

Telephone numbers donít all fit into hierarchies

Billions of processors created each year

Can participate in multiple, overlapping domains

Each processor can have many names in different domains

Addresses become names

DNS address becomes an email name

Addresses may be names

Geospatial addressÖ is it a name?

1 billion web pages, many fewer domain names

Things that will need names:

Every version of an object needs its own identifier

Temporal aspect. Timestamp is important. Need naming relative to the timestamp.

Capture spans

Every component of an object also needs its own name

Need names for aggregates of objects (refrigerator is more than the sum of its processors)

Home network devices

Photographs: names on old family photographs over time (whoís Mom?)

People (in specific contexts ñ online, offline, historically)

People want to talk to people

Ability to personally route information (me to my Mom to my sister)

Should there be a directory? Is it imperative that there not be a directory? Intíl directory assistance always ends up at a human.

Is a directory a namespace?

Parts of songs, melody lines, samples

Does the existence of a namespace make copyright infringement/enforcement easier/harder?

Continuous live video ñ how to name parts of the film

Naming parts of peopleís lives

Video codex

Do we want to name, or to give addresses to every atom, every molecule? Is there a distinction between useful names, and conceivably possible names?

PetsÖ plantsÖ

Telephone poles (infrastructure/capital items in general)

Dublin Core / bibliographic metadata

Astronomical information (Mythological-scale namespaces)

Hurricanes

Literary namespaces (JR Tolkienís names, Star Trek names)

Drugs

There is value in ambiguous names

Mapping between namespaces

Are there general-purpose name-to-name mappings?

Mappings will require names

Ontology problem?

Just one way of creating a relationship, probably many others

Ways to map one namespace to another:

Is mapping the same as converting?

Does a mapping mean they are equal in all cases?

Mappings may require complex rules that specify when the two (N) names are equivalent

Equivalency of drugs/medical information (protocols)

Standard disease reporting

Mapping a name from one language to another

Dereferencing a name may not yield a single result, causing problems for reverse mapping.

URL-like things, URN-like things, URC-like things

Possible to hold in a pocket the inverted index of all named things

Disk space growth is faster than Web growth

Does this imply we can employ a flat namespace, managed properly? Do we need hierarchy?

Maybe not flat: not hierarchical

Does a flat namespace imply a single control organization/authority?

Desire: tear apart the control hierarchy from the namespace hierarchy

Names as declarative vs. computed

Possible challenge problems:

Good driving problem for research/work on namespaces

Naming of newsgroups in the News hierarchy

Mail routing using only personal namespaces

(Physical) packages through any mail system

Inter-namespace traversals ñ interoperability issues

Versioning namespaces ñ travel through the namespace as it was six months ago

Real time event stream naming

Naming of data items within events

PagerNet ñ routing messages across multiple transport media (pagers, passing from device to device (bluetooth-like), IP)

What comprises Internet scale (vs. ìmilitaryî or just plain big scale)

Decentralization is key differentiator

Central model does not provide flexibility at the micro level

Highway obstruction example ñ donít want to wait for event to percolate up, then back down

Better to have cars talk peer-to-peer

Especially, what comprises key Internet scale namespace issues

Issue: how to get all cars to agree that an observed phenomenon (ìbox springî) is the same event (previously reported)

How do you name the observed event?

Internet has no center, highway system has no center: shared understandings critical for both

Different contexts lead to different security needs

Namespaces where people would pay to place entries in the namespace

Companies having an IPO that week (is this a good example, since itís a name to impending action mapping?)

Directory of affinity groups (Linux device driver developers)

An Internet-scale namespace requires resources to maintain it þ justification of focusing on commercial namespaces

Names acquire meaning over time

Names acquire value from history

Can be positive or negative value (bad image)

Can also have value before they have history (name speculation)

Artistic element of naming things so they can be distributed (sold/shown/expressed)

Vietnam veteranís memorial

Literary hypertext ñ node names together contain a story.