Add specification for unique, owned and authenticated Meta-IDs

[titusz]

At Meta-ID level users might want global uniqueness and be in control of the semantics by “owning” a Meta-ID as an ISCC prefix. This turns out to be a registration related concern.

We propose to introduce two new variations of the Meta-ID together with the planned blockchain registry.

The first variation would add an “owned”-flag to the Meta-ID-header, indicating that the last byte of the Meta-ID is a variable length uniqueness counter. The counter would be interactively incremented by the client software during the blockchain registration procedure to guarantee uniqueness and fixate ownership semantics for the given id to the signatory of the registering transaction. This would retain global clustering and de-duplication features while at the same time offering “owned”, authenticated and globally unique Meta-IDs.

The second variation would not depend on any metadata at all to better support automated identifier creation. For example many digital media assets (like photos or granular content) might not have a “title” at all. This variation would be a random or time based surrogate key, again with a uniqueness counter.

Both variations should include protocol specifications for blockchain registration, ownership-transfer and multi-party-ownership.