A case for information-bound referencing

Links and content references form the foundation of the way that users interact today. Unfortunately, the links used today (URLs) are fragile since they tightly specify a protocol, host, and filename. Some past efforts have decoupled this binding to a certain degree; e.g., creating links that bind to byte-level data. We argue that these systems do not go far enough. Our key observation is that users really care about the intent of the referenced link and are relatively agnostic to the byte-level representation. Based on this observation, we argue that references should be bound to the underlying information associated with the referenced content. We call such references Information-Bound References (IBR). In this paper, we focus on the challenges of creating IBRs for multimedia data, since these form a dominant fraction of Internet traffic today. We explore the trade-offs of various alternatives for generating and using IBRs. We identify that it is possible to adapt multimedia fingerprinting algorithms in the literature to generate IBRs.