Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Naming Things With Hashes

RFC 6920 (via Manuel Simoni):

This document defines a set of ways to identify a thing (a digital object in this case) using the output from a hash function. It specifies a new URI scheme for this purpose, a way to map these to HTTP URLs, and binary and human-speakable formats for these names. The various formats are designed to support, but not require, a strong link to the referenced object, such that the referenced object may be authenticated to the same degree as the reference to it. The reason for this work is to standardise current uses of hash outputs in URLs and to support new information-centric applications and other uses of hash outputs in protocols.

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As a non-programmer reader of your blog, my first thought was that this article was about "Twitter #music". :-)

More on topic, I'm involved with a company that is developing a SaaS graph database — dydra.com. Part of what makes it unique (and very performant) is that each RDF triple is identified with a hash. They call it content-addressable storage.

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