In this fourth and final installment of our look into the SMBmeta initiative put forward by Dan Bricklin, I'd like to explore the possibility of extending the concept to other than business objects.

Bricklin proposed (http://www.trellixtech.com/aboutsmbinitiative.html) SMBmeta as an online "yellow pages" type directory for neighborhood businesses to be able to connect with potential customers quickly and easily without needing the services of a programmer or Web master to create the necessary data.

The Burton Group's Jamie Lewis says of the initiative: "SMBmeta is a self-organizing directory. In contrast with X.500 and its descendants, SMBmeta is very decentralized, pushing responsibility and data ownership all the way out to the edge. It makes data aggregation a loosely coupled operation that anyone can perform. Pretty cool."

A self-organizing directory, a loosely coupled datastore. If every object (user, business, printer, coffee pot, whatever) was online and had an entry so they could share information publicly then finding people, places or things online could be much less frustrating than it currently is. Add in the Affirmation Authority proposed by Bricklin in the SMBmeta Ecosystem (http://www.trellixtech.com/smbmetaecosystem.html) and there's a way to ensure the truthfulness of the data as well as a potential for even tighter authentication and authorization (if you tie it to the SAML proposal, for instance).

The Universal, Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) standard, of which Version 2 was ratified last week by OASIS, is widely seen as failing to deliver on its promise of a universal service locator tool. It is gaining strength within the enterprise, though, as a way for users to locate services on their intranet.

Novell's .DIR global Top Level Domain (gTLD) initiative (http://www.novell.com/news/press/pressroom/news_brief/archive/2000/10/pr11.html) proposed that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) create a managed domain that would hold directory information for any current domain (e.g., novell.com.dir would hold the directory info for novell.com). The domain authority would have to approve all entries, ensuring truthfulness of the data in the resulting federated directories.

Dave Kearns is a consultant and editor of IdM, the Journal of Identity Management.