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With a variety of government, commercial, and research initiatives around Internet Identity, the question on if and how to create a common methodology for managing the bits of information about an entity on the Internet is in urgent need of an answer. The Kantara Initiative has sponsored a discussion group to look at the attribute management space and make recommendations on where focused effort from the Kantara Initiative might help move this space forward. And while attributes can apply to both individuals and devices the work here is focused on human (identity) attributes.
This report and associated recommendations has been developed out of several months of reviewing and discussing the attribute space across a broad range of sectors and interests. The wiki space for the discussion group includes a repository of links to information in government, commercial industry, and higher education in the United States, Canada, Europe, and New Zealand. From that base, we have identified the following gaps and made a set of recommendations for further work.
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Discussions around attribute management extend into discussing specific industry classifications and activity classifications. More work is needed, however, to understand industries and their associated activities that drive services, and develop a classification system for the processes underlying the activtiesactivities. For interoperability, we need an agreed upon taxonomy, syntax, grammar and semantics for these process patterns just as much as we need the agreement for the sets of attributes that are managed down in the bowels of these generic processes.
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