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I-nameI-names are one form of an XRI - an OASIS standard for abstract identifiers designed for sharing resources and data across domains and applications. I-names are human-friendly XRIs intended to be as easy as possible for people to remember and use. For example, a personal i-name could be as simple as "=Mary" or "=Mary.Jones". An organizational i-name can be a simple as "@Acme" or "@Acme.Corporation". I-names are called universal private addresses because they can be resolved using the XRI protocol into any other type of contact data for the identity they represent (or any other type of data under the control of this identity - see XDI). Privacy is protected because the identity owner controls this resolution. For example, the registrant of "=Mary.Jones" would never receive 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 legimate. 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". +names are extremely useful in data sharing because they can be used as XRI cross-reference 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. Although typically long-lived, i-names may, like domain names, be transferred or reassigned to another owner. For example, a company that changes its corporate identity could sell its former i-name to another company. Because a person's or organization's underlying identity does not change when their i-name changes, however, the best practice for persistent linking is to use an i-name "synonym" called an i-number. I-numbers are the second form of XRIs: persistent, machine-friendly identifiers (similar to an IP addresses) that are assigned once to a resource and never reassigned. The i-number that is coupled with an i-name enables a person or organization to maintain a long-term privacy-protected Internet identity that will not break even if their i-name (or any other contact data) changes. See Also External Links * The Social Web: Creating An Open Social Network with XDI in the Planetwork Journal.
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