Burton Group Identity Blog

Catalyst Europe is Coming Up Fast!

Blogger: Bob Blakley

We hit the stage for Catalyst Europe on April 19.  If you haven't already made your plans to join us in Prague, we've got a little treat for you at the end of this post.

We're going to focus this year on the emerging identity architecture.  If you're looking, you can see this identity architecture around you already, in offerings from mainstream identity vendors like Microsoft and Oracle, but also in offerings from smaller firms like Gluu, Unbound ID, Radiant Logic, and others.

The elevator-pitch version of the story is this: licensed provisioning software packages compete in a market for identity management systems.  User-centric identity providers compete in a market for identity providers.  What enterprises need is neither a market for identity management systems nor a market for identity providers - what they need is a market for identities.

Federation technology, directory virtualization, and contextual access control can be combined to create a technical architecture on top of which this market for identities can emerge.  The market for identities has many advantages, but getting there will take time and it will take work.  We'll lay out the roadmap in Prague.

If (like me) you're a last-minute kinda person and you haven't registered yet, here's your reward for waiting: use the promo code "INSIDER" during registration, and you'll get your ticket for the discounted price of only 995 Euro.

Sign up today and we'll see you there!

Relationship Paper Now Freely Available

Blogger: Bob Blakley

Folks have been commenting on our relationship work since Phil posted his Technometria interview with me on the subject.  Adam picked up on the talk with a characteristically excellent entry, and I agree with him that identity is created through relationship; in fact this is one of the points I was trying to make in the interview.  Gunnar read Adam’s post and added his thoughts here, and Tom Scott worked the relationship theory into a discussion of OAuth and OpenID here. In the comments to Tom’s post, Chris Messina asked him for a reference for the three types of identity I discuss in the Technometria interview. Until now, the reference (our “Relationship Layer for the Web” paper, which Kaliya referenced in her blog entry on the addition of Facebook to the OpenID board) has been available only to Burton Group customers.  I’m pleased to announce that as of today, it’s freely available to anyone at this link. 

The conversation about this paper has actually been going on for a long time.  Drummond kicked it off last May after reading a pre-publication draft.

Ryan, who also reviewed a draft of the paper, was confused by my proposed relationship data structure; he thinks I’ve introduced an extraneous third party into the picture and turned what should be a bilateral relationship into a multi-party affair.  Not so!  The relationship data structure is created by someone (in the case of my example in the paper it’s created by Facebook) and it asserts information about the relationship between a set of parties.  But there’s no constraint on how many parties are involved: the relationship data structure could be created by one party to describe his (her) relationship with another party.  Or it could be created by a third party (Facebook) to describe the relationship between two individuals who meet “under the auspices of the third party”.  In this case the third party sets the rules, and the individuals who subscribe to the third party’s services agree to abide by the rules.  This is simply a three-way relationship.  These arise in non-commercial contexts as well as commercial contexts; societies which practice arranged marriages are a good example.

If I wanted to I could create my own relationship object and offer it to the public as the basis for forming online relationships with me – this would not require introducing any third party Identity Provider into the picture, as Ryan claims.  And proposals to do this already exist; individuals setting the terms on which they will provide information to merchants is part of what Adriana Lukas has in mind with her Mine! Project.

Now that the paper is freely available, if you’d like to join the conversation, post a comment here or put up your own entry and track back to us.  We’d love to know what you think.

Credit where due: though I wrote the relationship paper, the work it's based on was done by our entire IdPS team, and builds on the "laws of relation" work of our former fearless leader, Mike Neuenschwander.