Upon2020 (archive)

  • The Inversion of the “Semantic Web”: semantics through HTML

    First there were the semantics, and then there are ways of rendering semantic information using things like HTML, or so established wisdom says. That’s why we have XSLT (to transform XML into HTML, for example, not the reverse), code and documentation generators (from UML, or from Java source code), and things like address book applications…

  • Today’s Bombings in London

    In the week after September 11, 2001, I wrote the following piece for the TEN newsletter. Hearing about today’s bombings in London, I feel compelled to re-publish. Last week’s horrific acts in New York and Washington took the lives of thousands, cost untold billions for reconstruction and reportedly were committed by a network of middle-eastern…

  • More on the relationship between InfoCard and the Identity Metasystem

    Many people (e.g. Doc Searls, Julian Bond, Dave Kearns) have pointed out to me that InfoCard isn’t the Identity Metasystem and won’t become it in the future either, since my post on Monday, and they are of course right. InfoCard, at the most, will be a component of such an Identity Metasystem, and there will…

  • What might an “Identity Meta-System” be?

    Microsoft InfoCard is frequently described as an "Identity Meta-System" (as opposed to, say, Microsoft Passport, which is/was a plain identity system and not a meta-system). This term seems to have beek picked up widely, but like some others (e.g. Doc Searls), the longer I think about it, the more I realize that I have a…

  • More Feedback on my Why Digital Identity Matters piece

    [Previous installment here.] Timothy Grayson hits the nail on (my?) head when he says: Your appropriately more earnest question is, I think, “Why are we splashing around in the shallows of an institutionally-framed, banal discussion about security, costs, and efficiency rather than rising to a visionary one focused on the power for d-ID to have…