It's interesting to see that Citizendium is interested in getting verifiable "identity data" concerning its contributors. However, I'm curious to know if anyone can suggest a fundamental difference between the kind of "identity data" that they seek and the kind of factual data that they will publish in Citizendium itself. What, if anything, makes qualitative identity data "different" from claims in any other realm?
<br><br>To claim that an individual does or does not hold the degree "Phd" seems to me to be very much like claiming that a battle did or did not happen at Hastings in 1066. (I assume that Citizendium will, in fact, have recorded within it the claim that such a battle did occur...) In both cases, a claim is made by some authority and the strength of the claim will, I assume, be largely related to the reputation of the authority. In both cases, however, the binding between the claim and the claimant is independent of reputation. The only difference between the first claim (re: Phd) and the second (re: 1066) is that one is a claim about a person and the other is not. However, it seems to me that the technology used to make one claim does not differ from the technology needed to make the second. Thus, it would be very odd, I think, if we ended up with one method for making claims about people and another for making claims about non-people... Citizendium should be able to publish statements like: "Professor X claimed, on 1-Feb-2007, that a battle was fought at Hastings in 1066." Then, just as people are likely to say things like: "I know it is true since I read it at Citizendium," other applications and other individuals should then be able to bolster their own claims by referring to the claims encoded on Citizendium. How is any of this different from what we need to maintain and assert claims about qualitative identity?
<br><br>bob wyman<br><br>