Difference between revisions of "Decentralized Resource Identifier"

Revision as of 16:37, 19 December 2019

Full Name or Meme

A Decentralize Resource Identifier is variant of a Digital object identifier (DOI) that always points to a single object that can always be resolved and recovered.

Context

• Idea articulated by Robert Mitwicki of Dativa at the Semantics Working Group of Hyperledger INDY on 2019-04-16.
• This concept was filtered through the needs of the US Trustworthy Healthcare Ecosystem of the Kantara FIRE working group requirements for a medical records locator.

Problems

• Nothing lasts forever.
• It is important to recover documents in an unchanged format, perhaps many years after the document is created.
• The only commonly agreed type of guarantee that a document has not changed is a hash of the content, but even that requires that we know the hashing algorithm.
• The proposal that a hash of the document be placed on a blockchain makes the assumption that the blockchain will itself survive all the turmoil that is certain in the coming years. Not a good bet.

Solutions

• Build an identifier that will always refers to the document based on its content, rather than the location where it is stored at any point in time.
• Assure some method that the validity of the document can be verified over time.

References

Other Material

• ODCA (Open Data Center Alliance)

  The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) is an independent information technology (IT) consortium whose goal is to develop a unified vision of cloud requirements.

• Content centric networking

  In contrast to IP-based, host-oriented, Internet architecture, content centric networking (CCN) emphasizes content by making it directly addressable and routable. Endpoints communicate based on named data instead of IP addresses. CCN is characterized by the basic exchange of content request messages (called "Interests") and content return messages (called "Content Objects"). It is considered an information-centric networking (ICN) architecture.

• IPLD

  IPLD is the data model of the content-addressable web. It allows us to treat all hash-linked data structures as subsets of a unified information space, unifying all data models that link data with hashes as instances of IPLD.

• Magnet URI scheme

  magnet is a URI scheme that defines the format of magnet links, a de facto standard for identifying files (URN) by their content, via cryptographic hash value rather than by their location. Although magnet links can be used in a number of contexts, they are particularly useful in peer-to-peer file sharing networks because they allow resources to be referred to without the need for a continuously available host, and can be generated by anyone who already has the file, without the need for a central authority to issue them. This makes them popular for use as "guaranteed" search terms within the file sharing community where anyone can distribute a magnet link to ensure that the resource retrieved by that link is the one intended, regardless of how it is retrieved.