identity management use case

[ this use case tries to motivate the requirement to have arbitrary RDF
resources representing the BRQL SOURCE part of a query (i.e. not simply a
URI) ]

MisterX is member of the great FOAF community and he has two different and
separated identities or persona(s) [1]; which correspond to his
credentials and personalities in two distinguished online communities
(let's call them A and B) E.g. he might be member of the RDF community as
well as Apache core member and developer - quite separated communities
still and he might be important for him to keep his identities separated
:)  MisterX has three separated FOAF profiles describing its two
controversial personalities. The first two FOAF profiles describe MisterX
his X persona/character (his email, his chat accounts, his publications
and so on) and are kept and maintained separately on different URIs from
the the FOAF profile containing his other Y persona information. While
MisterX might choose to keep only two separated FOAF profiles one for each
of his characters, in reality happens that parts of his FOAF profiles are
distributed and spitted over different separated files. For example, he
has two online persistent URLs representing each of his X and Y personas,
and a third ad-hoc maintained file which contains other information
relative about his Y persona (or even he might have a fourth FOAF profile
maintained elsewhere containing a mixture of the two personas to
facilitate his personal information management). This means that is not
generally possible associate a URI (or URL) to his distinguished personas
- but instead his characters need to be described, represented and
retrieved as separated resources.

Assuming that all three FOAF profiles of MisterX are available online, and
a given RDF / FOAF harvester program is scuttering them, some source /
provenance information about each FOAF URL profile needs also to be kept
separately. Such provenance information is explicitly referring only to
those URLs containing the three separated profiles and can not be used to
pin-point to the two distinguished personalities - but only to their
source URL. This generally would allow the crawler to distinguish between
them if necessary later on e.g. trackback which URL contains which
information. At the same time, each of his two personas are being
described in each of the FOAF file explicitly, and his foaf:Person triples
are being flagged/scoped into specific characters scopes as well. It is
important to note that his FOAF triples (name, email and so on) might also
have other contexts/provenance information attached to them. E.g. the URL
of the FOAF URL above - where they have been retrieved from. The crawler
software can either ad-hoc generate or infer the personas information from
running ad hoc queries on the retrieved files - or explicitly (and
automatically) associating each RDF triple using some specific RDF parser
extension [2]. In other words, the FOAF triples resulting from the
crawling process might resides in two (or more) separated scopes/spaces:
the URL of the FOAF (source/provenance) and the other, a foaf:Persona
typed resource (a bNode in fact) representing his persona(s). Now the
crawler has a publish Web interface which can be used by 3rd part services
applications. Such service, in addition to provide the raw RDF triple
sources also provides all the provenance/context information associated to
the triples; such information might be simply embedded into the RDF
sources themselves or provided in some ad-hoc generated manifest file and
referred from its Web interface. Let's assume that such 3rd party
application is a FOAF/people aggregator (e.g. like plink.org) which needs
to present and redistribute different people information also globbing RDF
descriptions by user persona/character (foaf:Persona) in addition to his
foaf:knows or other RDF properties. This means that the 3rd party
application has to run ad-hoc RDF queries over the retrieved data to
select user specific characters.

rdfs:seeAlso: http://rdfweb.org/topic/FoafAndTrust


Alberto

[1] http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=persona
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-interest/2004Feb/0209.html

Received on Wednesday, 25 August 2004 13:23:14 UTC