Re: International identity data standards?

Amen, brother. He speaketh the (unfortunate) truth.

On Tue, Sep 3, 2019 at 7:25 PM Justin Richer <jricher@mit.edu> wrote:

> I’m going to be pessimistic here, and if you want rainbows and flowers,
> avert your eyes. So the way I see it, here’s the problem:
>
> There has been a lot of work to create international standards for
> identity data. So many standards across so many domains that it’s easy to
> lose track of them all. But every effort to create The One True Ontology
> always, without fail, falls short of the most important feature of a
> standard: adoption.
>
> Standards are only truly standards if people use them, and it’s far too
> easy to create a new data schema on the fly. Or even just create data
> without a schema, and figure that you’ll clean it up later if you need to
> align things. As has been said elsewhere in this thread, there are huge
> efforts and entire companies that do exactly that.
>
> Don’t believe me? A simple question, then: how would you represent a date
> field? ISO8601? The combined timestamp or just the date portion? Are you
> using the “T” field separator or a space because it looks nicer (don’t
> laugh, I’ve seen it)? And what calendar system is this going to be in?
> Maybe that’s too weird, so how about epoch seconds? Epoch milliseconds?
> From which timezone? Or do we care about timezones at all? And is Taiwan a
> timezone? Depends on which country you ask from, on that one.  And if you
> ask most developers, it’ll be whatever “date.toString()” prints out for
> them.
>
> Data is messy, normalization is hard. But coming up with a data format is
> easy. It’s so easy that everyone just kinda does it, even to the point of
> creating defacto standards that people get stuck with for years. You see,
> the hard part isn’t creating them, the hard part isn’t even using them, the
> hard part is getting everybody to use the same one for the same thing,
> consistently.
>
> This is going to be true of any data standard no matter how good it is. I
> can tell you, this crowd loves schema.org, but most of the internet has
> never heard of it and doesn’t care about it or JSON-LD. I’m not making a
> judgement on how good any of the technology is, I’m simply saying that most
> of the world simply does not care that it exists because it by and large
> solves problems that they don’t see as problems. It’s only when you get
> into connecting completely different systems together that you start to
> wish your “date.toString()” had worked the same way on both sides, and at
> that point it’s usually more practical to just write a data cleanup and
> translation rule set instead.
>
> — Justin
>
> On Aug 23, 2019, at 3:26 PM, Liam McCarty <liam@unumid.org> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> Is there work being done to create international standards for identity
> data? For example, it would clearly be valuable to have standards for
> common data points like name, address, phone number, etc. If not that, it'd
> be helpful to at least have standardized mappings between different
> regional formats.
>
> I've done some preliminary research and discovered groups like the NIEM
> (National Information Exchange Model, which is U.S.-based) and UPU
> (Universal Postal Union), but not anything more comprehensive. If
> international standards already exist, could someone point me in the right
> direction?
>
> If not, creating international identity data standards seems like a
> natural extension of the work on DIDs and VCs. Would love to help kickstart
> that if people would find it useful.
>
> *Liam McCarty*
> Co-Founder of ePluribus <https://epluribus.io/>, Unum ID
> <https://unumid.org/>
>
>
>