Grid Identifiers Spec

Open Grid Identifier Notation

Draft 1
June 2008
Notice: This draft is for public comment.
David Jung (Cenji Neutra) Apez Corp cenji.neutra AT gmail.com
Copyright 2008, Apez Corp. All rights reserved.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ for details.
Abstract
The explosion in the number of virtual worlds, particularly those based on the OpenSimulator effort inspired by Second Life®, has given rise to the need for a universal and widely adopted notation for identifying distinct virtual worlds and their components. This document details such a scheme.
Status
As of June 2008, this document is a work in progress. Community input is solicited in order to mold this scheme into one that many parties agree to adopt and support.
This proposal is a 3rd-party community effort and it's presence on the Second Life wiki in no way implies the endorsement or participation of Linden Lab or its employees in any official capacity.
Please use the Discussion page for comments.

UPDATE: Please see the Discussion first.

Motivation

To illustrate the need for a standardized notation for identifying virtual worlds and their major components, we look to analogy with the early development of the Internet itself. In the early days of the Internet, each host had a host file, which was simple a text file that contained a list of the known Internet connected hosts, their IP addresses and host names. The hosts file was centrally maintained, manually updated and distributed to all Internet hosts. It served two distinct purposes:

As the number of hosts on the Internet grew, it became apparent that a centralized mechanism would not be adequate as the Internet grew. From that realization grew the Domain Name System (DNS) and search engine services. The DNS serves as a distributed implementation of a look-up service and search engines provide a way for people to discover what is available on the Internet (or Web).

Currently, there likely only a hundred or so long-lived persistent virtual worlds of significant size operating. If virtual worlds are to become a significant piece of the future of the Internet, we would expect their numbers to grow significantly, as has happened with the early Internet.

What this document details is a simple notation to identify major components of virtual worlds, analogous to the way host names identify web-sites on the modern World Wide Web. For example, "net.mygrid.main" represents a valid grid identifier.

How those names are used, the services that may exist to map identifiers to hosts or other resources related to the identified virtual world components and how the mappings are managed, is beyond the scope of this document.

It should be noted, however, that one practical motivation for the development of this notation was a need for it during the development of a lookup service that, among other things, will provide a (centralized) service for mapping identifiers of known virtual worlds to their corresponding resources. For example, mapping SecondLife and OpenSimulator based grid identifiers to their corresponding initial login URL.

Grid Identifiers

Identifier Notation

The identifier notation comprises a simple string of period separated labels, like the subdomains of DNS domain names. Each label should conform to the standards set forth for domain names (see RFC-1034). For example (and informally):


The identifier space

Identifier types


For example, valid OGIs are "com.secondlife.agni" (grid GI), "biz.apez.grid-a" (agent GI) and "org.osgrid.main-r" (region GI).

Expected practice

This section does not form part of the OGI specification, but appears in order to inform implementers of the ways in which GIs are envisioned to be used.

References