i-name

i-name

A human-friendly name in the XRI system for persistent naming on the Internet. I-names are registered to people, businesses, communities, as well as to any data resource. The registrar is an "i-broker," which enables the registrant to manage the i-name data record (the XRDS file).

People are =, Companies are @
A personal i-name starts with an equals sign, such as =john.doe, and a company i-name starts with an at sign, such as @mycompany. People and company i-names are high-level XRI names.

Communities and Data
A community can be created by subdividing an @ i-name with a star (*) preceding each individual, such as @mygroup*john.doe. Data names are created by subdividing a company i-name with a plus sign (+) for each data element, such as @mycompany+productA.

People (=) and company (@) i-names are managed by the i-broker; however, the * and + i-names at a lower level are maintained and managed in local servers, similar to the way lower-level DNS names are stored on a company's own DNS servers, not the top level root servers on the Internet. Individuals with = i-names can also subdivide their name into additional users and data in the same manner. See XRI, XRDS and i-broker.

   Symbol   User       I-Name Example

   =        Person     =john.doe

   @        Company    @mycompany

   @ and *  Community  @mygroup*pat
                       @mygroup*susan
                       @mygroup*joe

   @ and +  Data       @mycompany+productA
                       @mycompany+productB
                       @mycompany+productC