Fluidinfo namespaces provide a simple hierarchical way of organizing names - names of tags, and names of other (sub-)namespaces.
When a new user is created within Fluidinfo, a top-level namespace is created for them. For example, if Tim chooses the Fluidinfo username tim, a top-level tim namespace is created for him.
Fluidinfo usernames are case insensitive.
Tim may then add a tag called rating within that namespace with the intention of tagging objects with his ratings. With its name qualified by his namespace, Tim’s rating tag can be unambiguously referred to as tim/rating. By using namespace and tag names, with components separated by /, we can avoid any conflict or confusion with other Fluidinfo rating tags, e.g., sara/rating.
Namespaces are hierarchical. Tim can later create a new namespace, for example books, within his tim namespace, and in that namespace create an i-own tag. That tag would have a full name of tim/books/i-own. Tim could use it to tag objects in Fluidinfo that correspond to books he owns.
Because objects in Fluidinfo are not owned, another user, Sara, would be free to add her own information to the book objects Tim had tagged. Thus an object might have both tim/books/i-own and sara/rating tags on it, making it possible to ask Fluidinfo to find books with a high Sara rating but which Tim does not own.
When a developer writes a new application that uses Fluidinfo for storage, the application is also assigned a top-level namespace. For example, a mobile phone application which creates mazes for the user might have the Fluidinfo namespace amazing. It might create one Fluidinfo object for each maze, perhaps tagging the objects with amazing/maze-id. It might keep its high scores using a tag called amazing/high-scores, and it could record the time a user last played and whether the user had registered yet by tagging the user’s object with amazing/last-played and amazing/registered tags.
Just as with tags, when a Fluidinfo namespace is created, a description may be provided. There is a Fluidinfo object associated with the namespace and the description is added to it as a normal tag. As a result it is possible to search on namespace descriptions using a regular Fluidinfo query.
