[Esip-preserve] [esip-semanticweb] Identifiers for people?

[Matt Jones]

ESIP may find what we decided on for DataONE useful.  DataONE is using
InCommon (http://incommon.org) via the CILogon (http://www.cilogon.org)
 service to provide federated identities for users across many
institutions.  We are also following the ORCID initiative closely, as that
might prove to be a useful approach as well.  We have created an identity
management service that also allows mapping of equivalent identities across
InCommon identity providers, so if the same person has accounts under
multiple IdPs, they can map those as all equivalent.  ORCID may help with
this feature in the future.

Matt

On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 9:37 AM, Lynnes, Christopher S. (GSFC-6102) <
christopher.s.lynnes at nasa.gov> wrote:

> This topic came up at the last ESIP Semantic Web telecon, where URIs are
> needed to identify people for some of our linked data efforts.  I thought
> either Erin, Tom Narock, or Eric Rozell had done some thinking on how to do
> this, at least for ESIP members...
>
> On Mar 7, 2012, at 12:51 PM, Robert R. Downs wrote:
>
> > Curt  -
> >
> > You might already be aware of the activities of ORCID
> > http://about.orcid.org/ and its collaborators to address these issues.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Bob Downs
> >
> > On 3/7/2012 11:59 AM, Curt Tilmes wrote:
> >>
> >> A bunch of other groups have assigned various sets of identifiers for
> >> most of the other things I'm looking at (Thank you GCMD keywords:
> >> http://gcmd.nasa.gov/Resources/valids/archives/keyword_list.html)
> >>
> >> Most of the databases I see seem to ignore the need to unambiguously
> >> identify people.
> >>
> >> Most databases simply fall back on a plain text literal and identify
> >> an author as "John Doe" (or even "J. Doe").
> >>
> >> I want to indicate that "John Doe" the P.I. for an instrument is the
> >> same "John Doe" who authored some paper.  I need a clear, unambiguous
> >> identifier for that person.
> >>
> >> I could simply assign an integer as I insert into my database (I know,
> >> I know -- I am not a number, I am a free man!).  Another thought is
> >> UUID, even though they are big and ugly and make even bigger and
> >> uglier URIs.
> >>
> >> foaf:mbox_sha1sum [1] has a certain appeal since independent databases
> >> have a prayer of independently assigning the same identifier to the
> >> same person, but even that relies on jdoe at nasa.gov keeping the same
> >> mbox_sha1sum associated with himself when he becomes johnd at noaa.gov.
> >>
> >> Keeping the name itself in the URI is nice since you can look at it
> >> and know who it is talking about (try that with an embedded UUID), but
> >> what do you do when the 2nd (and 3rd) John Doe shows up?  Or if he
> >> becomes Jane Doe?
> >>
> >> Other thoughts?
> >>
> >> Curt
> >>
> >> [1] http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/#term_mbox_sha1sum
> >>
> >
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>
> --
> Dr. Christopher Lynnes     NASA/GSFC, Code 610.2    phone: 301-614-5185
>
>
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