Basic Concepts: Basic Data Types
Person
What a "person" is should be pretty obvious. The idea is that there is a constellation of information about each "person" which may be made
available to a given device (like a cell phone, computer, PDA, PVR, or what have you) in order to allow it to configure itself. This
includes information about services that the person has subscribed to (like email boxes, payment clearance services, instant messaging services,
etc.) and each of the devices that the person owns/uses. Here's an example person file.
Device
For every device there is a unique file containing information about what kind of services it gives access to, who owns it, where it is, what
it can do, etc. This would allow the constellation of devices that a person owns to know about and know how to communicate with one another.
This way when you buy a new cell phone it could offer to import certain data from other devices (like your old cell phone) or could offer to
register itself for services that relate to multiple devices (for example, enabling remote door unlocking for your car if you have a telematics
package installed). Here are some kinds of devices that would be represented in the system
Of course, anyone can have more than one of any number of these kinds of devices. Here's an example device file. In this case, it is a desktop computer. In the real system there would be a similar kind of file for each registered device.
Service
A "service" is a little more abstract thing. It would include just about any kind of thing a person can do with a device. Here are a few examples
of "services":
While subscriptions to services are part of the data stored in a "person" file, there is also some information recorded about each service that
someone could subscribe to in a service file. One example is a service file describing a
PVR (in this case TiVo) service. Another example is a service file describing a
an EarthLink mailbox.
Keys
Data Distribution Scheme
That's a quick overview. If you look at the sample XML files you will see a whole lot more depth implied by what is in there. Please do dig into them and
we welcome any comments or questions we would love to hear back from you at
In order to have secure storage and transmission (and verification of authenticity) of these basic objects there will be a public key registry
where public keys will be distributed. (If this doesn't make any sense to you don't worry...this is all just plumbing that's needed to keep the
data secure. Users will never see any of this. Anyone can download any public key they want. Here is
an example key file for a person, and another one for a service file
of the information if the private key is known.
There's a little information about each object which won't be encrypted with user keys because we need it in order to know where to cache the data across
the Net and in order to do a few housekeeping chores. For this purpose, there's a "control file" associated with each object which describes where
it ought to go. The reason for this might not be immediately obvious, so it deserves a little discussion. When a person grants permission
for his information to be released to a given service, he can specify which of his information should be released and this means that we need to
pre-sort this information and encrypt it so that it can only be read by the intended recipient, and we can forward it to the appropriate servers.
Imagine that you are eBay and you want to use AuthentiKey information which is released by people to make it easier to buy things. For performance
reasons you'll want a copy of all of that information sitting on a server in your data center which you can maintain and which will perform as
well as the rest of your very high volume servers. In order to understand where this data is supposed to go, we need to do some housekeeping on our
end and that's what control files are for. (The same goes for people living outside the United States...you don't want to have to access a
server in Pasadena every time you want to buy a coke in Thailand.) Here's an example of a control file
for a person, for a device, and
for a service.