Fieldnote
A person does not belong to a space
Why neither an affiliation nor a hosting space defines who someone is
Most systems meet people through an institution. A payroll, a membership register, a customer database, or a research project is where a person first acquires a record, and the record's key is the institution's key. It is natural to carry that habit into a federated world and say that a person "lives in" the Semantic Space of whoever first described them. This note argues that the habit has to be broken, and that RSM ID's design already breaks it.
Two facts in the specification carry the argument. A person's RID encodes no space, so no space is part of who the person is. And a Semantic Space is responsible for knowledge representations — descriptions, assertions, relationships — not for the existence of what they describe. A space can hold a great deal about a person; nothing in the architecture lets it hold the person.
What goes wrong if a space is the source
Suppose the Cedar Valley cooperative's operations space were treated as the source of Anika's identity because it recorded her first. When she left the cooperative in 2031, her identity would be stranded in an organization she no longer belonged to, administered by people with no duty to her. The soil observatory and the growers' community would each have to choose between referring to her through her former employer and creating a second identity, and two identities for one person is precisely the fragmentation persistent identity exists to prevent. Worse, the cooperative would hold a practical veto over how she could be referred to elsewhere.
The same failure appears with any space. A community's space as the source would make membership a precondition of identity and expulsion a kind of erasure. A health or research space as the source would tie a person's identity to the most sensitive context in which they appear, and every reference to them would point into it. In each case, a relationship has been promoted into a foundation.
A worked case
Anika's RID is 451.9J0RFXDGKFYE4CXS (Anika). Three spaces describe her. The cooperative's operations space records a seasonal role in 2031. The Valley Soil Observatory attributes moisture observations to her. Her own personal space holds the notes she chooses to publish. Each is responsible for its own knowledge about her and refers to her by the same RID; none of them issued her identity, and none is where she "is". Her membership of the growers' community from 2032 is a relationship, not a fourth space: the community is a referent, not a Semantic Space. When the cooperative's record of her role ends, the other spaces are unaffected and her identity is untouched.
Her personal space deserves a word, because it is the one most easily mistaken for her home. Document 08 allows a person to administer spaces of their own (§4.6), and Anika does. But administering a space is a relationship she has, not the ground of her identity: she was identifiable before she created it and would remain so if she closed it. Even here, the space holds knowledge about her rather than containing her.
The questions are distinct
Document 08 speaks of one space responsible for a resource's authoritative record (§2.6), while many spaces may describe it. Interpretation: for a person, which space should be authoritative may be contested, or have no answer that is public. That is acceptable precisely because it is a different question from the first. A person's identity can be stable while the knowledge about them is distributed, partial, and governed by many hands. It also means that privacy decisions sit with the spaces and the resolver, where policy can be applied, rather than being baked into an identifier that every system shares (§11.3).
What remains open
The specification establishes the separation but not every mechanism around it. An Identity Record may carry an authoritative space binding, and Document 08 does not say which space, if any, should be bound for a person whom no single space governs. Every RRN also carries a space segment, which raises the same question for a person's registered name (SPEC-09). And the issuance pathway for a person with no affiliation is unspecified (SPEC-01). None of these gaps weakens the principle; each is a reason to state it plainly before the mechanisms are designed, so that they are designed around the person rather than around whoever recorded them first.