Digital Identity

Naming

Naming is one of the fundamental abstractions for dealing with complexity. Names provide convenient handles for large, complex things—allowing them to be manipulated and referenced by some short, easy-to-remember string, instead of a longer, unwieldy representation. Filenames, for example, let us pick a meaningful handle for what ultimately is a collection of bits located on a particular set of sectors on a particular set of tracks on a particular set of disks.

Names also disassociate the reference from the thing itself, so that the underlying representation can change without changing the name. Perhaps the most familiar example of this is domain names. The domain name http://windley.com points to some IP address. If I decide to change the machine hosting the services at http://windley.com to another one with a different IP address, it's easily done and everyone referring to the name will still end up with the services that they are looking for.

Namespaces

A namespace is the universe within which a name is guaranteed to be unique and defines where the name has meaning. For this reason, namespaces are sometimes called "domains ." A family name (usually) acts as a namespace wherein given names are unique and meaningful. In an email address, the name (the part before the @ symbol) is guaranteed to be unique within the namespace (the part after the @ symbol). Filenames are unique within the namespace of the directory in which they reside.

Namespaces can be flat or hierarchical ...