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The natural addressing of customers (users, organizations, base and value-added services, information resources and systems) is the basis of the seamless infocommunications (SI) technology. The main principles of the natural addressing are:
• Absence of strict technical restrictions applied to an address. The customer defines own address on his or her own. Usually such an address is a textual string that is not restricted by strict limitations in terms of a length, characters used and language. However, any unique piece of digital information is suitable as an address including those resulting from digital import like multimedia objects or biometrical parameters.
• Independence from technological addressing of a telecommunication network. A customer address depends only on a customer option and does not depend on properties of his or her connection to a telecommunication network. For establishing a communication session, natural addresses of customers are automatically replaced with the technological addresses of their respective terminals. This allows telecommunication networks to continue using a conventional technological addressing that in this case is practically invisible to the user.
• Multi-address approach to a customer identification. The customer may be available at multiple own addresses simultaneously, each of which was defined on his or her own. For every address, the user can independently state a presence status and communication services for which he or she is ready to receive a call.
• Unrestricted customer grouping. Customers may create and join groups connecting users, organizations, services and information systems, which are related to the same area, organization, activity type or interests group. This way, full address of the customer consists of multiple segments, in which the second and following segments specify the group address (address context).
• Ability to incorporate other addressing and identification systems. Existing addressing and identification systems like postal addresses, phone or identification numbers can easily integrate into common space of natural addresses because they are subsets of it. This allows users to stay available at their traditional addresses assigned to them earlier as well as to implement national or other addressing and identification systems for direct communication with users. To avoid conflicts, such addresses are registered in special contexts.
The main goal of the natural addressing is to allow infocommunication users to acquire most suitable and easy-to-remember addresses. It allows them to use for a communication session initiation their habitual ways to identify themselves and each other they used in a normal, face-to-face conversation.
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