Posted 8:49 AM

The Fourth Law

Kim has now posted his Fourth Law of Identity which is:

The Law of Directed Identity
A universal identity system MUST support both "omnidirectional" identifiers for use by public entities and "unidirectional" identifiers for use by private entities, thus facilitating discovery while preventing unnecessary release of correlation handles.

In his explanation of the law, Kim touches on many of the aspects of what I've called "Persona," (part of the "Taxonomy of Identity" proposed by the Directory Interoperability Forum's Ed Harrington)which, in turn, is linked to Andre Durand's "Three Tiers of Identity." Andre, of course, is honcho of PingID, and it was that organization's Eric Norlin who started Kim Cameron on the path to discovering the drawbacks to Bluetooth (which figure prominently in the discussion of the 4th law) with his discussion of the "Polycomm scenario."

The fourth law also recalls many of the aspects of Novell's DigitalME which allowed for the creation of multiple identity "cards" which would be presented to (previously defined) groups, and which almost became the foundation for the "Personal Directory" that was an on-again, off-again project at Novell. Maybe, finally, it's time has come.