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Subject: Re: [xdi] Two terminology questions: "global" and "root"
I’ve always understood the first address segment (say, =drummond) as stating the owner of a subgraph or local graph corresponding to a user account in other operating systems or database systems. Until recently I hadn’t noticed explicit statement that initial address =drummond meant that Drummond is the authority asserting the statement. Although naturally stuff in Drummond’s account will often or usually include statements that Drummond believes are true, I don’t see them as automatically equivalent, and the latter raises questions for me. Is stuff under the =drummond subgraph automatically stuff that Drummond asserts? It’s data that Drummond and his personal cloud agent are using, but it may include statements that are asserted by someone else that Drummond just knows about but does not necessarily assert himself, or statements that are inherently known to be true and not asserted by anyone in particular. How would each of these be symbolized? Do we even want a default assumption that a =drummond…. address implies Drummond is asserting the statement containing the address? And since a statement has subject, object, and predicate, is it only the subject address that carries this assumption, or also object, or all of them? Couldn’t the provenance or authority asserting a statement also be represented by a separate property? How frequent will conflicting cases be? Conflicts should only happen in cases of conflicting statements. For data, I’d assume the default is non-conflicting - if we merge contact databases each with a contact for Drummond, the resulting contact normally has all the phone numbers and emails of both contacts that were merged. We have a great deal about link contracts specifying when someone can access data - can link contracts or their subcomponents also control, or state, who is asserting or vouching for a statement? It seems to me they would naturally be related. —————————————— I think “global” or “universal” are clearest, if we want to say something is true everywhere or exists everywhere. On global vs. local addresses, it seems clear to me we need both, and need to distinguish them. In Unix, global addresses start with the path separator /, while relative addresses start with an identifier. In XDI, the context symbol characters carry more information than simply separating identifiers in successive segments, which makes it difficult for an address to start with no path separator at all. Could we designate using the empty dollar word as first segment to indicate a global address? I.e., simply precede the address with $, which would be followed by the context symbol of the following identifier. The word “root” itself strongly connotes a single global root in Unix-style terminology which is universal in operating systems everyone uses. Something owned by a user is called other names like home directory or folder, or user account, never root as far as I remember. Using “root” to refer to a “local root” will be confusing not intuitive. We should find names other than “root” for everything but the global root. “Inner root” is perhaps the single most difficult term in XDI in my opinion. Although I’m not sure completely understand inner roots yet, when trying to describe them by analogy with other systems, words like “context” or “scope” come up; perhaps we can use a name with these suggestive words? The current use of “context” in XDI, on the other hand, is diluted by the fact that practically every node is a context node, so that “context” is no longer specific, but simply means “node” or “subtree” in generally used graph terminology. I would vote for restricting the word “context” to refer to something more specific, perhaps an inner root. On Nov 27, 2013, at 3:08 PM, Drummond Reed <drummond.reed@xdi.org> wrote:
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