OpenID and name authority

In his Science in the Open blog Cameron Neylon has written an interesting post, A Specialist OpenID Service to Provide Unique Researcher IDs? in which he asks:

Good citation practice lies at the core of good science. The value of research data is not so much in the data itself but its context, its connection with other data and ideas. How then is it that we have no way of citing a person?

Cameron suggests that OpenID might offer a solution to this.

I have been very interested in OpenID for some time. I like the relatively agile way in the which the standard has evolved. I like the fact that it has been responsive to the developer community. I agree with Andy Powell when he talks about the importance of the capacity for the delegation of the service providing your OpenID - I've maintained an OpenID for myself at http://paulwalk.net despite having changed the underlying OpenID identity provider service twice. However, I've become frustrated by the way in which OpenID has been deployed and couched almost entirely in terms of it's potential to solve the often-exaggerated problem of users needing to maintain too many user accounts (although I confess that I have contributed to this). Personally I maintain a small handful of username/password combinations for accessing hundreds of web services - it's a minor inconvenience. And as Mike Ellis pointed out in a great post, OpenID: fail:

In a technical sense, OpenID works. But from a usability perspective, it’s absolutely horrible.

I blogged about OpenID a while ago, saying:

I’ve thought for a while that the introduction of URIs for people was the often overlooked yet potentially most interesting aspect of OpenID. In a resource-oriented-architecture, it would seem plausible to suppose that a reliable pointer to a representation of a person would be a useful thing. But when I try to sketch out a useful application for this, I struggle....

The idea of using OpenID as an 'author identifier' in scholarly communications has occurred to me before too - specifically in the context of repositories. I agree it could play a part here. At one level this could be seen as an extension of the ongoing persistent identifier issue in the context of web-resources, being applied to people. However, as an OpenID is a URL, it is open to the same criticisms levelled against the use of URLs for papers in an institutional repository for instance (the delegation feature does mitigate this, albeit only slightly).

One aspect of OpenID, which I think might become relevant if OpenID reaches any kind of critical mass as a public identifier system will be the way in which a given OpenID could gain authority over time. The only thing you can trust about a newly minted OpenID is that you can interrogate the 'user' of the OpenID and verify that they are the agent which 'controls' or 'owns' it. However, an OpenID will rarely be surfaced without other metadata about the agent - there will be a context in which it is used. In a community of researchers for example, as a particular OpenID is used more and more by a researcher in various contexts and systems, a level of trust will build around the association of that OpenID with an actual person.

For a long while I thought that OpenID might be the answer to a problem arising out of the need for a different user-account in every system we use - not the bogus issue of needing to remember lots of passwords, but the fact that this creates an immediate obstacle to joining up those systems at the level of the user. This issue has become more visible with the systems underpinning social networks. I see all kinds of potential in being able to conclude that while I might not know the person identified here in this system, I can be sure that they are the same person in this other system, because they have the same OpenID. Of course there is all kinds of potential for abuse of such join-up, but I would still like to be able to control such arrangements myself.

Increasingly, I'm annoyed by my social-web activities being constrained unnecessarily by really prosaic limitations in the systems I use. As I said in another post back in September 2007:

Now, it’s certainly not unusual to maintain more than one, unconnected circle of contacts. Many people prefer to keep their professional and their social networks separate. But, and this is the important point, I really don’t want my social networks to be constrained by particular software choices. As I can connect resources across the web in a uniform way to form a network of resources, I want to be able to connect people to form my social network. Perhaps OpenID or something similar could provide the solution.

Imagine a Web where everything you did publicly was linked by the very fact that you were represented by a URL exactly like your blog post, or your photo on Flickr, or your post on Twitter, or your correction to that Wikipedia entry, or your research paper in your institutional repository for that matter.... think of the possibilities.