BIB-VERSION:: CS-TR-v2.0
ID:: STAN//CSL-TR-00-804
ENTRY:: September 05, 2000
ORGANIZATION:: Stanford University, Computer Systems Laboratory
TITLE:: IdentiScape: Tackling the Personal Online Identity Crisis
TYPE:: Technical Report
AUTHOR:: Maniatis, Petros
AUTHOR:: Baker, Mary
DATE:: June 2000
PAGES:: 22
ABSTRACT:: Traditional systems refer to a mobile person using the name or                  
address of that person's communication device. As personal communications
become more diverse and popular, this solution is no longer adequate, since 
mobile people  frequently move between different devices and use different 
communications applications.  This lack of identifiers for mobile people causes 
problems ranging from the inconvenient to the downright dangerous: to locate a 
person, callers must use potentially multiple email addresses, cell phone numbers,
land line phone numbers or instant messaging IDs; callers leave sensitive 
messages on shared voicemail boxes; and they send communications intended
for the previous owner of a telephone number to the next owner.  To solve this
naming problem, we should be able to name people as the ultimate endpoints
of personal communications, regardless of the applications or devices they use.

In this paper, we develop a naming scheme for mobile people: we derive its
requirements and describe its design and implementation in the context of
personal communications.  IdentiScape, our prototype personal naming scheme, 
includes a name service which provides globally available identifiers that persist
over time and an online identity repository service which can be locally owned and
managed.
         END:: STAN//CSL-TR-00-804