A uniqueness of public address is a common rule of any user addressing system.
Legacy addressing systems limit the ability to choose a unique name by addressing rules and address formats. An address format specifies a set of possible addresses so the user address must belong to this set and do not conflict with any existing address.
For example, a continuous phone numbering system limits the ability to choose unique number by applied number width. Similar restriction constrains ICQ numbers. The rules of popular Skype communicator allows a user login to be 6 to 150 character wide but do not allow usage of spaces in a login.
Most communication systems support only single public address format and therefore single set of possible unique addresses. Constant increase of phone number widths and move to IPv6 addresses are examples of problems posed by fast occupation of fixed address spaces.
Additionally, not every address in a legacy addressing system is appropriate to the user. High additional fees for short and easy-to-remember phone numbers, theft of handy ICQ numbers and high speculative price of topical “speaking” Internet domain names are the examples confirming this fact.
The ability to create and join SI public contact groups provides the way to extend the ability of choosing an appropriate unique user address. This is so because SI public address may consist of multiple separate units each of which have its own meaning indicating a public user name or an addreess context.
This way a public address may represent a job position while contact group name represents a unique company name. Thus, various users may define the same public name but in different contact groups, so complete public address will stay unique. For example, various users may define the same public name “Chief Financial Officer” but with addition of a group name, that is the company name (fig. 25), full addresses became unique.
Fig. 9. Same named members of various contact groups.
SI address may include some area name (Fig. 10). It may be a name of the city, region or state, etc. This allows users and information resources included to a regional group have locally unique names as well as to indicate their location and provide some useful region-specific information about his or her self or an information resource respectively.
Fig. 10. Regional user groping.
A public personal address may include a name of group created to connect people having the same interest (Fig. 11). It could be such a social network as a group of classmates, co-workers, hobbyists, sportsmen, etc. This allows users or information resources included to an interest group to have group-unique names as well as to indicate their interest category and provide some useful interest-specific information about their selves or information resources.
Fig. 11. User grouping on the interest basis.
In addition to social networking and address context, the user-grouping feature is also useful for building virtual private networks with ease. |
