Gunnar Peterson, has a thought provoking post on OpenID and attributes. He quote heavily from another interesting post on names from Mike Neuenschwander. The idea is that names, without attributes are not very useful.

I agree wholeheartedly with the assertion that we have to get OpenID and other wide-area identities past simple authentication for them to really be useful.

Mike says:

I understand why from a programmer's perspective, it would be so much more convenient if everybody could simply have one globally unique, unambiguous, resolvable name. But such a quaint design constitutes a wanton disregard for reality.

The tech industry is adolescently ID-fixated. But I've had it to here with IDs! Would somebody please start seeing my avatars as something more than identification objects? So here's to being an OpenAttribute power user!

From Burton Group Identity Blog: Identity's Inconvenient Truth
Referenced Thu Mar 15 2007 20:27:32 GMT-0600 (MDT)

This is too true. We're not going to get to a point where people have a single unique identifier--ever. In fact people are going to have many identifiers and will link them--or not--as it serves their purposes.

This is the basis of the project I have my students working on this semester. One way to look at it is that we're building a reputation server for OpenIDs. Another way to look at it is that we're creating a facility for linking identifiers, associating some attributes with them, verifying some of those attributes, and then building rules around those attributes (and other transactional data) to return reputation scores. We're exploring the idea that reputation can serve as a proxy for explicit authorizations in many cases.