Talking as much about identity as people do, it is interesting to notice how many different meanings are attributed to the word.

One that is most often used is 'identity' meaning a 'unique identifier'. For example, Phil Windley in his recent blog entry says:

"Identity is a set of properties. Collect enough properties and only one individual has them all."

Talking about identity management gives the word completely different spin. When I tried to answer the question, "what is identity management" some time ago, I came to conclusion that it's about authentication, authorisation and personalisation. Which is bit broader than just pure identification.

Most recently when I preparing a presentation on digital identity for some government clients I used following definition from Cambridge Online Dictionary:

"[W]ho a person is, or the qualities of a person or group which make them different from others"

I like this particular definition, mainly because its "who a person is" part. In my view, who person is is a combination of one's a) self-image and b) social interactions with the rest of the world. As self image depends on self-understanding which is difficult to capture in an objective form, part of the identity that is constructed through interactions, or 'social identity' remains.

This is captured in a very good paper by Timothy Grayson who, among other things, notices,

"When we have started from the beginning and improved the systemic integrity of the social identity system, we will be on our way toward a robust and valid digital identity system. It is, by all accounts, infeasible to do the reverse."

I'm one with Timothy on that if we want to have richness of the real world in electronic world, we need to come up with something more sophisticated than identification, authorisation and personalisation. What is it going to be, I don't know, but given various recent discussions going around, neither do others. Perhaps it's something to think about then.

10:47:45 PM