Digital Identity?

FEDi is mainly focused on managing digital identities and brokering them through trust relationships. So before going to more implementation details or architecture of FEDi project we have to know what is digital identity means. But I am not an identity expert to teach you about digital identity or how we going to represent real world identity on digital world. Here are some brief descriptions from several web sites about identity.

• Wikipedia: Digital identity refers to the aspect of digital technology that is concerned with the mediation of people's experience of their own identity and the identity of other people and things. Digital identity also has another common usage as the digital representation of a set of claims made by one digital subject about itself or another digital subject.

• Roger Clarke: An identity exists in the real world, not on disk drives. It is a presentation or role of some underlying entity. An entity may be a pallet full of cartons, or an artefact such as a computer, or a mobile phone; or a human being.

• Identity Gang: A digital representation of a set of Claims made by one Party about itself or another Digital Subject.

• An identity is the set of the properties of an entity that allows the entity to be distinguished from other entities.

• Kim Cameron: In these pages, I’ll make it clear that digital identity can’t be confused with ”a unique identifier” like an SSN or a biometric like DNA. In fact, digital identity can often just convey that you are a member of some group, or possess some characteristic (for example, your profession, employer, citizenship, role or age). Similarly, it can indicate that you are the same person who visited a site previously - without conveying any personally identifying information.