- From: =Drummond Reed <drummond.reed@evernym.com>
- Date: Tue, 3 Sep 2019 20:10:04 -0700
- To: Justin Richer <jricher@mit.edu>
- Cc: Liam McCarty <liam@unumid.org>, "public-vc-comments@w3.org" <public-vc-comments@w3.org>, "public-credentials@w3.org" <public-credentials@w3.org>
- Message-ID: <CAAjunnbm9gEu2XDJwfcWjr4g8Y8-rCfKhQQd_OGnu_yZabOttg@mail.gmail.com>
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/> > > >
Received on Wednesday, 4 September 2019 03:10:45 UTC