Abstract

Attribute Management is a hot topic in the Internet world today. The goal of the Attribute Management discussion group is to determine what Attribute Management actually means to Kantara Initiative (KI) stakeholders, what areas need further discussion or development, and to make recommendations for further work. The charter states:

IDENTIFY: Kantara Initiative stakeholder requirements regarding Attribute Management.
GAP ANALYSIS: Attribute Management KI stakeholder requirements compared to work under development (both internal and external to KI)
RECOMMEND: scope of work, potential KI adoption of external works, collaboration with external organizations and/or new WG in KI to perform design phase of Attribute Management based on requirements, discovery and gap analysis.

The purpose of this report is to Provide a high-level look at the current state of the Attribute Management space and make recommendations on where further work would provide the most value to KI stakeholders.

Introduction

Note: full charter of the discussion group is available online

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.
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.

Identifying Requirements for Attribute Management

http://kantarainitiative.org/confluence/display/AMDG/Attribute+Requirements

After several weeks of discussion and collecting information from sources across a variety of sectors, the members of the Discussion Group condensed the requirements for what is needed for Attribute Management as follows:

1. There must be a base set of attributes and associated definitions and representations available to all interested and involved parties.
2. There must be a catalog of vertical specific attribute set (i.e. extensions).
3. There must be a list of authoritative sources for attribute sets.
4. Individuals and service providers must have the ability to protect and share these attributes.
5. There must be coordination among the groups creating and using these attributes.
6. A framework to address privacy, trust and level of assurance of attributes is necessary.
7. There must be a process to allow for ongoing evaluation of where the attribute ecosystem stands (i.e. governance)

Gap Analysis

As the group discussed requirements, identifying where those requirements had no cohesive, supporting effort behind them guided the definition of gaps in the Attribute Management space. Some areas had some work associated with them, but the effort behind that work either addressed only a small section of the problem space or seemed to be working in a vacuum. The list below highlights the significant gaps and where efforts exist (if any) that start to fill those gaps.

The attribute space - Areas of interest, summary of efforts, categorization of gaps

While this document takes a high-level, broad look at the attribute management space, finding information on all the activities and common definitions in this space to any kind of detailed level was impossible. The repository of information put together by the Attribute Management Discussion group is a start, but pulling together a more granular document should be a fundamental requirement to further work being done by Kantara. The general consensus is that it is better to take the time to find where work is going on than to duplicate effort.

Efforts in this space:

• Kantara Initiative Attribute Management Discussion Group