Identity, Who am I?

Well that is a very important question. I am the son of Robert and Joy White. I am the brother of John and Stephen White. I am the husband of Doris White. I am the parent of Robert and Jennifer White. I am a employee of Walmart, in Parker Colorado. I have a United States Passport, I have a Colorado drivers licenses. I was born in Austin Texas. Each of those is a piece of informations which describes who I am. But is that the real me? They do not talk about the experiences I have had, or the education I have had, or what I believe about me or what I believe about the reason for human existence. How do you find out who I am?

On the Internet it is even harder to come to a exact description of who a person is or their identity. The Internet was designed without the idea of identity built into its structure. My computer has an IP, but that is not who i am. I have a email address but that is not who I am. Those at best are just identifying information about me or my computer or where i receive email. Both of those pieces of information can be changed and they will not change who I am. The best way to describe me is by saying who I have been known by or as, or by what I have done and or when and or where that happened. Collectively I can be identified by who i am known by and what i have done and when and where that happened. Those kinds of information can be checked and verified by asking other people, or checking records at other institutions and locations. My identity could be described as what I have done and when and where I did it. The same things can be said about my identity of the web. This information could be called my online reputation or my online identity.

So how do you find out who I am on the web? Well I have done a lot of the work for you. I have found a site called Claimid.com. http://claimid.com/rmarkwhite This is a collection of the sites that I participate on on the web. There are other sites that could be called search engines or aggregaters. Some of them seach the web and look for identifying information and make list where that identifying information is located. Google is probally the best know of these places. Go to http://Google.com and Google your name. Find out what Google knows about you. Wink.com and Spock.com are two of the best identity aggregaters.

If you want to know who I am you could ask the people who know me. How would you find them? well i have done some of the work for you. I have a PGP key. Some of the people I know on the web have signed my pgp key saying that they know me. I have a foaf file I have filled out saying that I know a rather large group of various people around the world that I have listed in that file. On various social networks I have lists of people who are variously called my friends or contacts or otherwise have been identified as knowing me. Classmate.com is an excellent way to find out who I went to school with or worked with.

Ok, then who am I? That my friend is something i have spent my whole life trying to figure out. Only a very few select people really know the real whole of me. I think I really like it that way, to tell you the truth. I have written at least one book of my thoughts and beliefs trying to describe in words what i think I know about life and other things… http://geocities.com/rmarkwhite/toc.html

I have many blogs, more than I can keep up with really http://robertmarkwhite.blogspot.com is my political blog. I have been writing there for a few years now about politics in the USA.

I guess the best answer is if you find out please let me know. I have been wondering about that my whole lifetime.

sincerely yours

me

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RDF, the idea of the connected web.

I have been struggling to learn about RDF lately. Rdf is a way to write/store/exchange information that is usable in many ways. If i write a paper in english and send it to a person that doesn’t speak english the information in the paper is worthless. However the beauty of rdf is that the information is written in a such a way that it can almost universally be able to be understood, by a person using almost any language. What is really special is that a machine/computer with the proper programing of course, can also read and understand this information.

Language has been a barrier to human communacations since the beginning of language itself. But teaching computers to read and understand what they are reading has been a even bigger problem. Words are only understood in the context that they are used. RDF encodes the information in a fixed or rigid context that can be understood by anyone or any computer programed to do just that. The way this is done is called ontologies. Ontologies are structured vocabularies. These Vocabularies are found on the Web and so when you reference the word you are trying to encode in a rdf document with the URL of the definition of that word, then the word can be understood in context by another human being anywhere that they can access the web or any machine/computer that can also access that information on the web. Many of these ontologies are being cross referenced to many different languages around the world, so if the word is cross referenced or translated into the language you are sending the information to, then the other person who speaks the other language can also understand what you are saying.

To give you a simple example, if I say my mothers name is Joy in english, and the ontology I am using to reference the word mother, is also referenced in the language of the person I am sending this informations to, they they will know that the English word Mother means Mother in their own language and that my mothers name is then word Joy.

Now to do this I must list the name of the ontology I am using and the URL of that ontology, and use proper reference word to the word Mother in that ontology, then the person receiving the information can access the ontology using the url giving and access it in their own language and then lookup the referenced word used for Mother in their own language, then they will know what I am talking about. The same system must be used for each term/word I talk about in the paper.

{Me} {Mother’s} {Name}

{ME} the person making the statement – http://someurl.com/ontology/me

{Mother} the relationship to me – http://someurl.com/ontology/mother

{Name} her name – http://someurl.com/ontology/name

Marks mothers name is Joy.

Now do this for every statement you make and you now understand RDF.

This system can be applied to any topic that there is a ontology to express. Most of the ontologies are scientific in nature, such as in Genetics, or Biology or in other fields of Medicine. However there are ontologies for recipes for cooking, or describing books or papers written. There are even ontologies for describing the discussions on the Internet. This is what they are describing when they are calling the Internet the connected data network. As more and more information or data is encoded into the rdf type formats more and more information will become connected. This will make information on the web searchable by computers and understandable by anyone anywhere using any language.

Microformats, another great idea.

I have been learning about Microformats recently. Microformats are a way to imbed information on web pages so that machines can read them and index the information and truly use the information they are picking up. The problem with web pages as they have been for years is that people could read them with no problems but machines could not really understand what was on the page. With microformats computers can not only read a web page with microformats on it, but can understand what information is encoded into them. This is important so that a computer can read a page and answer questions about what the information is and what it means.  Before you could have a web page with your travel plans on it and your friends could read it but a computer could not understand what the information meant or use it to answer questions about your travel plans. Now microformats are a way to say i am traveling on such and such airlines and on day on such and such a flight going from here to there at such and such a time, and have a computer read it and understand the informations provided and make it able to answer questions about who is traveling and when and where they are going and when they are going to getting there.

Those smart IT guys are developing ways to query this information using sparql and find out all kinds of things that they could not have gotten from old fashion web pages without a human reading the information and answering the questions.

There many other things that can be encoded in using Microformats. Calender information, your personal contact information, and your resume even, are all able to formated into the new microformats. These are just a few of the things more and more types of information is going to be able to microformated in the near future.

Foaf, an idea whos time has come.

I am very excited about Foaf. Foaf is a technology that has been around awhile but i think its time has come. More and more websites are adopting Foaf. Foaf allows you to list information about yourself and your friends in a way that is both human readable and machine readable. So you say what is so important about being machine readable. Ok, that is a fair question. How many times have you joined another social website and had to tell it all over again who your friends are, when they are already listed in the last half a dozen social sites you have joined.  Well Foaf solves that problem. Write your foaf file once and if the new site can read the foaf format it can add your information and your friend’s information to your new social web site automatically.

There are issues around foaf file’s that still need to be solved like privacy and security. But it seems to me that these issues are finally being addressed and hopefully will be solved in the very near future. Some real smart people are looking into this problem and are coming up with some pretty cool ideas about how to solve them.

Openid, the newest lastest idea.

I am very excited about Openid. Openid appears to me to solve some real world problems. I am really tired of having hundreds of login usernames and passwords. Openid solves this problem big time. I have one username and one password that can be used at literally thousands of Web sites all over the web. The problem is not all of the sites i currently use accept openid. Hopefully that will change in the near future. More and more places on the web are issuing openid’s, the newest and latest one and one of the biggest is Yahoo. AOL is another big name that has also come on board as a issuer of Openid’s. Now all we need is for more of the everyday websites to start accepting openid. There is hope I wont forget all of those different login username and passwords by the time they all start accepting openid’s.