Personal Namespaces

In this paper we propose an over-arching namespace that serves to abstract away the Internet’s current and obscure naming schemes from users. We argue for users to have personal namespaces that are not concerned with unique naming of resources, but rather focused on aiding user’s interactions with the system. This additional namespace does not replace any of our current (or future) naming systems. Rather, our vision calls for adding a naming layer that provides the ability for users to meaningfully alias network resources (especially their own). These aliases become context-sensitive, provider independent names for objects that can be easily shared among people. In addition, we sketch a strawman system—called pnames—in high level terms as a starting point in the discussion of how such a system might be built.