And he has some concrete experiences around this problem from LDAP. Interestingly enough, his mappings went through UML as the modeling route, which is very similar to the way that we are thinking about this at NetMesh.

His point about conceptual difficulties — not just implementation difficulties — about multiple ontologies is right on the money, of course: different cultures use very different attributes to identify people, and FirstName and LastName is not something that works everywhere.

I wonder whether there is some kind of international standard in use for passports. (the real ones that you show at the border.) They must have solved that problem somehow, in a way that works for all countries world-wide that issue passports?