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Tech Notes Articles on Identity Digital ID World
Newsletter - immediately
following the Digital ID World conference in Denver Digital Identity
World Magazine Esther Dyson: Executive
summary of a longer report on Identity Management The Economist - Jul 18th 2002: Internet standards can no longer be written by technology firms alone http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1240843 Digital Identity
Weblog Advocating a PGP/PKI
email solution to spam Possible approaches to identity XNS: Open XML-based
eXtensible Name Service protocol for identifying and linking any resource
in any kind of digital transaction. OneName (XNS based
digital identity implementation) In praise of OneName,
Digital World Article Friend of a friend:
An XML RPC approach using RDF (stops short of addressing any of the
hard problems) Ascio: A DNS based
approach, still Windows only server implementation, but an open source
port is welcome MPEG21: An MPEG
standard for identity Other Resources and Reports LinkTank A report on ASP
services for non-profits One Northwest:
IT services for NGO's in the Northwest USA Concept mapping
- Visualization tools for knowledge management Dark Fiber - Tracking
Critical Internet Culture Tools Linkify Votery SNT group
space
Listserv
Approaches There are a number of potential approaches to establishing a first implementation of a system which would satisfy the criteria of a distributed decentralized system wherein each user controls their own identity and relationship data. XNS, and the OneName implementation of XNS, - an XML based identity system appears the most promising approach Friend of a Friend XML RPC - as the name implies, an XML implementation of a peer identity system. It appears to be a plausible start, but has yet to address any of the hard questions of security or emergent ontology's. It uses RDF to define taxonomies which ultimately is not likely to scale as well as an emergent system such as the topic maps approach. see Steven Foster's section of the LinkTank report Ascio - a DNS based approach to identity, offered by the Belgian ISP Ascio, as a value add for ISP's. It is currently only available on windows server implementation, but Ascio would make it available for an open source implementation. PingID - another private identity player, based in Boulder. The principals recognize the need for interopperability and are interested in working toward open standards. They want to be the VISA of identity. JXTA - Sun Microsystems open source peer-to-peer infrastructure initiative. Sun had to walk a very fine line between doing enough to give the project standing while staying hands off enough to give it space to live as an open initiative, so JXTA is still too skeletal to use. There seem to be some serious questions about security which is still the unanswered question for many approaches. Reptile -an open source reputation based RSS system which may have tremendous promise, though it still seems to be more centered on publishing documents than on individual identity. Envoii - an object oriented graphically rich browser extension and client app which could be used to implement a user identity system, perhaps on top of JXTA. MPEG21 - an extension of the standards work from audio and video content into user description and self-description. Apparently the standards body may have diverse enough representation to prevent it being co-opted by the DRM crowd from Hollywood. ICQ a primitive
toy, but has a very large user base.
updated: October 17, 2002 - 10:06 pm PDT |