Tuesday, August 19, 2008

User Identity Reference Model - 19 Aug 2008

We met again at my day job. Still far from consensus. Some people are suggesting completely different approaches. Changes from the prior version include the following:
  • Changed Personae to Personas at the suggestion of a tech writer.
  • Removed the one-to-many link at the left of box 5. It depicted that a Digital Persona could have multiple other Digital Personas. In today's version a Digital Persona can still have multiple roles, and a role can result in multiple Digital Personas (e.g., accounts, certificates) for the represented Subject. This builds on an idea that if a subject has multiple Digital Personas, there's probably a reason, and that reason could be expressed as criteria for being assigned a Role (with resultant Digital personas).
  • Removed Attribute from box 6. An attribute describes either a Digital Persona, or the Subject represented by a Digital Persona, so the concept of attribute has now been moved inside box 5. Roles are still a separate box, because they tend to be assigned, rather than inherent to the Digital Persona. True that a role may be expressed in the form of an attribute in a directory; but if it's an assigned value, then we're calling it a role.
We're still wondering/debating if a Sponsor relates better to a Subject, or to a Digital Persona.

Here's the model as of today:

Fred Wettling suggested we take a look at the CIM model (see commend on prior post). I haven't gotten around to that yet, but hope to soon.

1 comment:

pc said...

I've been watching the progression of this model since you posted it - it seems that for a given identity workflow, that sponsership would follow the identity (for example in a professional work setting) until the identity was turned into a digital persona (digital representation of the ID).

When starting a new job for instance, the sponsor on the first day would be human resources, however, as you move to your end location, your sponsor would be your manager or the person in the organization who is responsible for employee authorization