Re: FIRE

to follow up on what William Loughborough said:

> Is it conceptually possible to make a "Filtered Interface REgistry" that
> would function as a "poor person's firewall", interpose an internally
> maintained proxy server with a registry of all one's name, address, etc.
> and properly secured credit card stuff so that a conforming interactive
> forms submission on a Web site could (at the whim of the client) access
> all that information without one having to repeatedly be entering
> "William Baldridge Loughborough..." (with a surname as long as mine this
> becomes a main reason for having wanted a computer in the first place!)?

Yes, these facts can be saved for you by a remote server, and
they can be remembered for you by your PC.  If you let somebody
else remember this stuff, there are security and privacy issues.
If these facts are going to be remembered on lots of PCs by
software from competing companies, there are data definition
issues.

That's the point of defining an e-commerce schema using something
like RDF so that all web tools would have a sufficiently
interoperable idea of the data fields that go into a retail sales
transaction, and whether you were operating from Quicken,
CitiBank, Opera or whoever, the associations (through the schema)
of the fields in the commercial website and the remembered
personal profile in your cache somewhere would auto-fill those
things that you had filled in on some other form.

Al

Received on Sunday, 31 May 1998 16:23:59 UTC