Put together by the WebID Incubator Group chaired by Henry Story.

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Abstract

A global distributed Social Web requires distributed identity. Following up on an earlier paper by An identity system that fits the philosophy of the web must have the following properties:

agents should be able to control their identity,

this identity should be linkable across sites - placing each agent in a Web of relationships,

the web of relationships should build a web of trust that allows each agent to determine for himself what trust anchors he wishes to be guided by,

it should be possible to describe each agent flexibly,

it should enable global authentication,

it should allow flexible access control that is both easy for humans and machines to use and understand,

it should be respectful of privacy,

the whole lifecycle of an identity, from setting up a profile, to editing it, to possibly deleting it should require nothing more than HTTP, extended by the Linked Data Platform.

The following specs have been put together by the WebID Incubator Group with those properties in mind, and following on Tim Berners Lee's Socially Aware Cloud Storage note.