Re: [Simple] Address and person URIs

[Paul Kyzivat <pkyzivat at cisco.com>]

Jonathan Rosenberg wrote:
> Henning Schulzrinne wrote:
>
> > The basic problem with a "human" URI is that there does not appear to 
> > be a unique, universally accepted identifier for humans except one 
> > that each human picks randomly from a very large space. References to 
> > the 'mark of the beast' are left to other discussion venues. (Even 
> > then, I suspect that lots of Chinese will randomly pick human:888888 
> > [http://www.travelchinaguide.com/intro/social_customs/lucky_number.htm])
>
> I don't think we want to label a human, per se. What we really want for 
> person to person communications is a place - i.e., "room 527".

Well, a place isn't always sufficient. We see this all the time in the 
movies: "Meet me in the bar of tha Acme Hotel at 7pm on April 1, 2005. 
I'll have a red carnation in my lapel."

So we don't need a *globally* unique person identifier. We need a person 
identifier that is locally unique in the context of the time and 
location of the intended meeting. And the time is important too.

The time we can deal with. With regular status it is NOW. We can use 
timed-status to cover some other time.

I don't think location has to be part of the Contact, as long as it is 
provided as part of the (timed-)status along with the contact.

Coming up with URIs for identifying people locally within a particular 
time-space region sounds like future research. Sounds like some sort of 
arbitary predicate would do the trick.

> > For human-to-human communication, it is also more often than not 
> > unnecessary to know which precise DNA instantiation will be meeting 
> > me. Indeed, for privacy reasons, such unique identification is 
> > undesirable. Thus, unique identifiers are the wrong model for 
> > identifying human-to-human interaction. While, therefore, a human is a 
> > resource, an identifier is unnecessary and undesirable, making a URI 
> > scheme dubious at best.
>
>
> Actually I suspect that, if you think of it in terms of "go here to talk 
> to me", then the same postal URI structure would probably work, but just 
> a different scheme.

	Paul


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