XNS or XRI: What's in a name?

(Via TIDBits) Yesterday, Identity Commons and XDI.ORG announced the resurrection of XNS (eXtensible Name Service) reborn as i-names in a new system known as XRIs (eXtensible Resource Identifier).

A service offering the first privacy-protected global Internet address is being launched today as part of a three-month fundraiser by a consortium of organizations and Internet broker service companies led by Identity Commons. Identity Commons, whose mission is to foster trusted communications over electronic networks, took the charge in developing what could become the world's largest experiment in combating the menace of spam.

Adam Engst, once a board member for the first incarnation of XNS, explains:

First, as we discovered, it's nearly impossible to create a new standards organization from scratch, and since the entire point of standards is that everyone agrees to them, it makes a lot more sense to work with existing standards organizations. As a result, the core technologies that lay under XNS now reside with OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), a non-profit, international consortium that focuses on standards relating to electronic commerce. Second, XNS was split into two separate parts: XRI (eXtensible Resource Identifier) and XDI (XRI Data Interchange). XRI is a protocol for identifying any abstract object in a location-, application-, and transport-independent fashion, and XDI is a Web service for distributed data sharing using XRIs.

FWIW, four years ago, I was an early adopter of XNS. I found my old XNS handle was pretty easy to reactivate in the new environment. =madtom lives again!

Posted by Tom on October 26, 2004