[Esip-preserve] [esip-semanticweb] Identifiers for people?

[Matt Jones]

Hi Chris --

My characterization of InCommon is definitely broader.  They serve
essentially all of higher education, including 2 and 4 year degree
institutions.  This includes many community colleges, and museums are
certainly in scope, as would be teaching colleges.  The K-12 link isn't
explicitly in their mandate, but I suspect anyone focused on science data
would have no trouble joining, including citizen science groups.  Also, the
way we added in mass support for additional people that aren't part of
InCommon is via including Google's OpenID provider in our list of
acceptable IdPs for CILogon.  Those aren't verified accounts, but we can
manually verify them if needed.  And other trusted OpenID providers could
be added as well if needed.

Building a large-scale, federated user identity system is not easy, and
requires a lot of resources.  We found it beneficial to build on top of
InCommon's existing 228 member IdPs, as that's 228 institutions that we
don't have to establish agreements with ourselves, nor collect names and
contact info. And its reliable, vetted, data.  Personally, I think creating
yet another list of IDs for people without mapping to existing initiatives
would be a daunting task, if only from the perspective of how one would
maintain such a system and keep the user IDs from going stale.  There are a
lot of people in the community.  I don't know of any other initiatives that
are as successful at aggregating identities for the types of users in ESIP,
but if you know of any, it would be great to hear about them.

Matt

On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 10:10 AM, Lynnes, Christopher S. (GSFC-6102) <
christopher.s.lynnes at nasa.gov> wrote:
>
>
> Well, I can't argue with the various goals and technical work going on in
> these orgs, but I wonder if these are all inclusive enough for our purposes
> in ESIP.  incommon.org is for government-registered/funded research
> organizations and sponsored partners; orcid is for "researchers".  What
> about museum curators? K-12 educators, community college teachers, even
> teaching colleges that don't do research? Not-for-profit applications users
> (e.g., environmental orgs)? Citizen scientists? Independent organizations,
> like the Society of General Agitators?
>
>
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