
Johannes Ernst contacted me today to tell me about Lightweight Identity (LID). Coincidentally, I'd seen it on Jamie Lewis' blog last week and had it on my list of things to write about (which is essentially equal to my list of things I want to know more about). I first met Johannes in May 2003 at a Jupiter conference on blogging in business. Johannes' company, NetMesh developed LID as a simple, easy-to-use, decentralized way to create identities. LID has a few features which will appeal to many:
Identities are urls (no new namespace)
You control the url and what's there (completely decentralized)
Built on standards including vCard, FOAF, XPath, and GPG
Japan Connection here..
Randy Gordon wrote to me a few days ago and was talking about the mathematics of identity. In particular, he referenced this Ph.D. thesis from Japan by Tadao Ishii on neoclassical logics with identity connectives Randy believes, and I agree, there there is room to formalize some of the identity discussion in a language for making identity assertions like the ones I mentioned in the last paragraph. That language could be the basis for building a system of trusted relationships between the referents of an entity.
