Re: Dr. Bunsen's URI and knowledge sharing

Hi Scott,
Well said!!
Regardless of how we chose to identify ourselves, either using a Wikipeople
profile, a purl, or a university url to identify both ourselves and our
credibility bound to the institution where we work, I agree it will
be extremely important to chose the authentication authority wisely.
The current web 2.0 approach seems to be forcing the users to create a
new account everywhere where they want have access to tools or data. But we
can already see some web applications, such as sourceforge or google, that
delegate the authentication to other authorities - a protocol that describes
how such interaction between applications could occur has indeed been
proposed, called OAuth (http://oauth.net/).
Web applications using OAuth, instead of asking the user to create a new
account by inputting a password, redirects the user to a trusted website,
for example google or paypal, and that is where the authentication happens.
Once the user is authenticated, google or paypal send the user back to the
web application where authentication was required, along  with some token
that can be verified with google, which indicates that the user has or has
not been authenticated.

Lena


On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 12:09 PM, M. Scott Marshall
<marshall@science.uva.nl>wrote:

> Jonathan Rees wrote:
> > Thanks to Kaitlin Thaney for the following.
> >
> > http://www.flickr.com/photos/kaythaney/3592177513/
>
> Jonathan's post reminds me of an issue that is important to knowledge
> sharing and has been on my mind lately: Scientists are often just as
> concerned about *who* said something as they are about *what* was said. The
> need to unequivocally identify a person is a requirement that comes about
> when we share knowledge because we need to know who has provided an
> assertion, and often, under what circumstances (i.e. with what evidence,
> measurements, etc.). Such 'knowledge provenance' is becoming increasingly
> important because systems are being developed that would make use of both
> manually curated facts and those computationally generated or 'mined'. This
> has been coming up in many different groups and events, including the HCLS
> Scientific Discourse and BioRDF task forces, myExperiment, HypER
> http://hyp-er.wik.is/ , and likely Sage[1]. Apparently, this topic also
> came up at the International Repositories Infrastructure Workshop where
> Jonathan was present[0].
>
> The similarity between the requirements for shared names, in general, and
> 'people identifiers', in particular, is readily apparent: we would like
> unambiguous and permanent URI's to be provided from an authoritative and
> neutral source. I don't know about you but if Shared Names offered people
> identifiers, it would be my preferred approach. However, Shared Names has
> limited the scope to GO dbx records for the moment.
>
> Are there alternatives to the DIY do-it-yourself approach for those who
> need people identifiers *today*? The only thing that I can think of is
> WikiPeople[2] (which could create an awkward situation if someone else with
> the name Michael Scott Marshall creates a page, who wants to be M. Scott
> Marshall 2?). Oh wait, there's more at a Crossref blog [3], although I don't
> think that sharing hypothetical information with other scientists shouldn't
> require you to have an 'author number'.
>
> One thing that I like about WikiPeople is that it puts identity in the
> hands of the owners of the identity. Unfortunately, I think that a code is
> required instead of a name to truly scale. Also, I suppose that the most
> surefire way to ensure that an identity system doesn't get messy is to
> require authentication e.g. a certificate from a Certificate Authority that
> has high requirements for authentication such as presenting a passport. Such
> levels of authentication are currently required for European and Dutch grid
> certificates (finally, a use for such seemingly exaggerated
> grid-burocracy!).
>
> -Scott
>
> [0]
>
> http://maurice.vanderfeesten.name/blog/2009/03/20/international-repositories-infrastructure-workshop-persistent-identifiers/
> [1]
> http://blogs.bbsrc.ac.uk/index.php/2009/05/sage-has-its-time-a-large-scale-open-access-resource-for-systems-biologists/
> [2]
> http://proteins.wikiprofessional.org/index.php?title=%20WikiPeople&action=edit
> [3]
> http://www.crossref.org/crweblog/2009/04/the_buzz_around_people_identif.html
>
> --
> M. Scott Marshall  (still have to get a PURL ;) )
> http://staff.science.uva.nl/~marshall
> http://adaptivedisclosure.org
>
>
>
>