RE: Unique handle generation

["Brian W. Spolarich" <briansp@walid.com>]

> One record will point out a person (as an example). A person have a 
> lifetime of say 120 years. We need to find a handle which can have 
> the unique identifier for at least 120 years.

  This is a great discussion, but I find myself asking the question:
is this our problem to solve at the moment?  Creating globally-unique
identifiers which will live a very, very long time is a pretty tall
order.

  Perhaps we're trying to "boil the ocean" with this?

  Have any other identifiers (other than government-issued things like
Social Security Numbers, driver's license numbers, and the like) met
this requirement?

  I kind of like the digest-based approach (although perhaps SHA-1
would be a better choice than MD5).  The user can identify themselves
via some relatively static information such as complete name, 
city and country of birth, date of birth, etc. and this results in
a digest that should be guaranteed to be unique.  The user can
easily reconstitute this identifier by supplying the source information,
which they should know fairly well.

  Its not clear to me however how this scheme would facilitate easy
referencing of entities, so perhaps that's where this concept falls down.

  -brian