| articleBody
| - Problem Analysis
I recently read a Guardian newspaper article [1] about the ever-increasing "Identity Crisis" issue on the Web. Fundamentally, organizations have had blurred identity for years online. This includes situations in which entities deliberately or inadvertently masquerade as original providers of products and services that ultimately ends of confusing customers, amongst other issues.
Identity is basically a collection of claims that can be verified using a "proof of work" algorithm. Typically, the aforementioned algorithm(s) sit at the core of an authentication protocol.
Typical "proof of work" examples include:
Use of asymmetric keys to create and verify digital signatures
Placement of tokens in index pages of Web Sites that are known to the identity claims verifier (this is what you do when setting up sites for directed-crawling via Google Web Master Tools)
Use of email addresses in a two-factor authentication scheme based on special URLs
Augmenting existing protocols (e.g., TLS) with additional relationship type lookups from using RDF Language statements -- what WebID and the WebID-TLS protocol are all about.
Naturally, different kinds of implementation challenges affect the options above.
Practical Solution
Increasingly, Web Sites are publishing documents that include structured metadata constructed using terms from the Schema.org vocabulary which actually includes specific terms for dealing with the aforementioned identity problem on the Web.
How it works
Rather than depending solely on the value of the name property, Schema.org includes a sameAs property that takes a Web document location/address (URI/URL) as its value. Basically, the nature of the aforementioned property is InverseFunctional which simply means that its value uniquely identifies any possessing entity i.e., any entity that has the aforementioned property (attribute, or characteristic).
I will use the rest of this post to insert actual structured data using RDF-Turtle based nanotation to demonstrate the effects of the schema:sameAs property, in regards to identity verification.
Embedded Structured Data
What follows is machine- and human-readable notes embedded in this using subject, predicate, object based sentences. Net effect, this document is now a live container of structured data i.e., a functioning data source (as is the case with and database document).
{
a schema:WebPage, schema:Article ;
schema:mainEntity dbpedia:Google, dbpedia:Ryanair, dbpedia:EDreams ;
schema:about ;
schema:url ;
schema:name "eDreams website is still a nightmare"@en;
schema:image ;
schema:relatedLink ;
schema:publisher ;
schema:mainEntityOfPage <> .
## Publisher Profile Information
a schema:Organization ;
schema:name "The Guardian Newspaper"@en ;
schema:partOf ;
## Identity Claims
schema:sameAs , ;
schema:mainEntityOfPage <> .
## Additional Property Definition for additional use as an InverseFunctional relationship type
schema:sameAs
a owl:ObjectProperty ; # meaning: its value is a reference rather than a literal
a owl:InverseFunctionalProperty ; # meaning: object (value) of this property uniquely identifies its subject (entity)
schema:mainEntityOfPage <> .
## Comments
<#Comment20160113>
a schema:Comment ;
schema:author ;
schema:text """This post demonstrates how the nature (semantics) of a property aid entity identity verification and disambiguation.
It also highlights how this is easily achived by embeddeding structured metadata in a Web Page.
"""@en;
schema:mainEntityOfPage <> .
## My Identity Claims
a schema:Person ;
schema:name "Kingsley Uyi Idehen" ;
schema:description """Founder & CEO, OpenLink Software. Fundamenally interested in anything relating to open standards based
data access, integration, and management.
""" ;
schema:sameAs , , .
}
Visualization of the statements above, through the lenses provided by our Structured Data Sniffer:
Here are links demonstrating the effects of importing this post into a system (our URIBurner service [2]) that understands RDF Language based sentences/statements:
http://linkeddata.uriburner.com/c/9VXORHT -- description of this LinkedIn post
http://linkeddata.uriburner.com/c/8Q5ZYE -- description of a specific sentence (datum)
http://linkeddata.uriburner.com/c/8Q5ZYP -- description of Guardian Article.
Conclusion
Identity has been a problem for a while on the Web. Its importance and implications are growing exponentially. That said, as demonstrated by the example in this post, current innovations associated with structured metadata creation and deployment provide practical solutions to this most important issue and challenge.
References
http://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/jan/12/edreams-ryanair-court-customers-paying-price -- Guardian Newspaper Article
http://linkeddata.uriburner.com -- URIBurner (an RDF Language processing and transformation service).
Related
Identity, Privacy, and the Magic of being You!
Importance of Digitally Signing Emails
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RDF
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ODATA
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
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