  Nontechnical users who own increasingly ubiquitous network-enabled personal
devices such as laptops, digital cameras, and smart phones need a simple,
intuitive, and secure way to share information and services between their
devices. User Information Architecture, or UIA, is a novel naming and
peer-to-peer connectivity architecture addressing this need. Users assign UIA
names by "introducing" devices to each other on a common local-area network,
but these names remain securely bound to their target as devices migrate.
Multiple devices owned by the same user, once introduced, automatically merge
their namespaces to form a distributed "personal cluster" that the owner can
access or modify from any of his devices. Instead of requiring users to
allocate globally unique names from a central authority, UIA enables users to
assign their own "user-relative" names both to their own devices and to other
users. With UIA, for example, Alice can always access her iPod from any of her
own personal devices at any location via the name "ipod", and her friend Bob
can access her iPod via a relative name like "ipod.Alice".
