The idea is that in future tokens will encode a mapping of instance to position. However, we don't want to include the full instance name in the string representation, so instead we'll have a mapping between instance name and an immutable integer ID in the DB that we can use instead. We'll then do the lookup when we serialize/deserialize the token (we could alternatively pass around an `Instance` type that includes both the name and ID, but that turns out to be a lot more invasive).
Erik Johnston