D2.3: Models

 

A Overview of Standards for the Representation of the Person

 

The details of the different standards that are referenced in this section are provided in “ ”.

 

The objective of this overview is not to make a complete inventory of these standards (such task would rather belong to a workpackage such as “WP4 Interoperability” or “WP3 Technologies”), but to contribute to a better understand the Identity concept by analysing, thought different standards, contexts in which the identity is represented and used.  

Indeed standards of representation of the persons consist in a well defined specification of a set of attributes that can be used to represent the identity of a person in a particular application domain or in general purpose Identity Management Systems. 

 

Note: the standards for the exchange of identity information (.i.e. protocols) are considered to be outside the scope of this document since they are not considered to be central to the comprehension of the structure of the Identity. Processes and protocols will more specifically be addressed in “WP4 Interoperability” and in “WP3 Technologies” (Identity Management systems). 

 

We can distinguish two main categories of standards for representing person’s identity: 

1. General Identity representation standards. 

2. Application specific standards. 

    

   General Identity representation standards of representation of the person have been defined mostly independently from any application domain, in order to specify the representation of a particular identity aspect. Usually led by a technical standardisation group such as ISO, IETF, ANSI, Liberty Alliance or W3C, they represent some of the elements participating in the construction of general purpose identity management systems. Some of the most important elements of the identity that are represented in these standards are the identifiers that can be associated to the persons (such as named, Ids, signatures), and other directory information (addresses, title, etc.). Typical standards include directory schema (LDAP, Liberty Alliance), but we can observe an increasing importance in the scope of these standards (for instance Liberty Alliance ID-SIS-GL cover instant location, and general standards such as XCBF are being elaborated in order to represent biometric information).

   Application specific standards for the representation of the person have been defined specifically to address the needs of a particular application domain (such as Justice, Human Resource Management, Education, Commerce, etc.). The standards of the representation of the person usually represent a subpart of the more general standards that are used to model any categories of information in this domain. Application specific standards are usually defined by organisations that are important stakeholder in the domain (such as IMS Global in the domain of e-Learning or the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) for JXDM), and sometime coordinated by business oriented standardisation organisations (and more particularly OASIS). Typical standards include IMS Global / LIP (learner information package) for the domain of e-learning, HR-XML used to design human resource management systems (an important facet of this standard is dedicated to the modelling of the employee) or JXDM (Justice Markup language) that is used by the Us Department of Justice to describe in particular the person information related Justice.

   These two categories of standards can be considered as very complementary and connected, and the application specific standards are expected to increasingly rely on the general identity representation standards as those later ones are extending their scope of application. 

    

The following table list many of these different standards (See “ ” for more detailed description of these standards).

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