Problem Space
From IdCommons
Lack of Catalogue Related
Background: Imagine a world where identity "agents" perform a variety of cool services on behalf of individuals. To do so these agents need to manage identity-related interactions with a wide range of sites and web services that are distributed over the net. Beyond common protocols to carry the data, the data payloads must be mutually understandable. For this to happen we need to be able to either share the same syntax and semantics, or at least know how to translate on the fly.
- No Catalogue. Developers and implementers of the identity aspects of systems, often (usually?) create their own schemas for identity information instead of reusing common ones. One simple reason for this, is that there isn't a convenient catalogue of such schemas. We would like to create such a catalogue.
- No Common Description. There are many languages and formalisms to describe schemas. This working group needs first to agree on a small set of ontology description languages that it will support.
- Lack of Tools. We need tools to help create and maintain the catalogue.
- No Community. Even if we solve the above, we'd be lacking an open-to-all community of folks who would like to contribute to populating and maintaining the catalogue. We need to create a site and easy-to-use tools to promote easy, self-service registering of schemas.
- No Reputation System. If we allow anyone to register their schemas, we might end up with a terrible signal-to-noise ratio. Perhaps this catalogue/site needs some kind of a repuation system to help folks more easily find the best stuff.
