Upon2020 (archive)
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Comparison of Identity Vocabularies
Digital identity only works if I can send some piece of data to you, such my home phone number, and you don’t think it is my car’s serial number or my dog’s birthday. So agreeing on a vocabulary between the parties in a distributed identity system is crucial, otherwise meaningful transactions are impossible. (If you…
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Mark Wahl comments on my “multiple ontologies for identity data” post
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…
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How do we deal with multiple ontologies for identity data?
We have been working on a comparison of the ontologies of various identity systems at NetMesh in recent weeks. (Or schemas, or vocabularies, or models, or what-shall-we-call-them.) In other words, we’ve been comparing the quantity and quality of the meta-data that defines the meaning of the identity information that can be exchanged between parties according…
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After MicroID, now PersonCode/NanoID
Hans Gerwitz writes to tell me about a proposal he calls PersonCode. If I understand this correctly, the idea is to run a person’s e-mail address through a secure hash function, and use the result to correlate the same user’s accounts on different services. He writes: What I want can be described by a simple…
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How does identity data relate to transactional and other kinds of data?
Is it non-overlapping? The same, or a subset? Is there overlap; if so, where, and under which circumstances? These questions are at the heart of the thought process that needs to get into designing identity technologies for the era of pervasive identity. For example, if the answer was "non-overlapping", then we could merrily go ahead…