Mobile devices and mobile data - Issues of identity and reference

As we begin to develop architectures to guide the engineering of context-aware computing systems, we will need to apply significantly more precision to the notion of "context" than is afforded by common usage of this term. In this essay, I identify three distinct realms of contextual reference. First, the physical context allows us to imbue our machines with a sense of "place" in the most literal sense of that term. Second, the device context concerns the relations among information processing systems as such. Finally, computing systems have an information context. The study of information contexts is the province of the discipline of Information Architecture, which we may define as the design of information entities abstracted from the machines that process them. Although these topics raise diverse issues, they arguably all share a need for a uniform basis for dealing with matters of identity and naming. The first step in developing such a basis is the adoption of a uniform scheme for universally unique identifiers, both for identifying digital objects and for referring to physical phenomena.