Federated Ecosystem

Full Title or Meme

A sub-set of living and non-living components what work together in the real-world to increase the information content of the local environment.

Context

• The most current paradigm for digital Ecosystems is the internet taken together with the definitions and components maintained by ICANN, for example the Domain Name System which servers as the root for all URLs used on the internet.
  • As originally envisioned the URL obtained with a name lookup that started with the ICAN root server would result in an Identifier in ASCII that was human-readable.
  • As the internet expanded beyond its original basis in ARPANET, the new languages and cultures turned to the Identifiers returned by the name lookup into something that was easy to spoof.
• The domain name was defined to be extensible, for example endpoint.company.com can be converted to an IP address by the following steps:

1. ICANN root server will provided a link to the .com domain, which can be considered as a federation of business sites.
2. .com name server will provide a link to the company.com domain which gets an Enterprise server which hosts a collection of servers controlled by the Enterprise.
3. company.com server will provide a link to one particular server (perhaps one of many) that can services a request.
4. endpoint.company.com can initiate further navigation based on the contents of the URL as needed.

Problems

• So how can a User know enough about a Web Site to make a trust decision about it.
• As noted above the URL has failed in its goal to be human-readable as it was pulled in other directions.
• EV Certs were established with a view to solve this problem, but have failed for reason noted on that page.

Solutions

• A Federated Ecosystem considers how to partition the solution into federations using the existing paradigm of the DNS, but starting from a source of Turst and maintaining that Trust as the federation Evolves.