* Identifying the word that defines identity
What should we call the sum of all of the identity information for an individual? Last fall when I proposed a taxonomy for identity management, it was easy enough to use the term “persona” for that facet of ourselves applicable to a broad situation – a business persona, a family persona, a social persona and so on. Similarly, it wasn’t difficult to define “role” (a term readily adopted from directory services) as a specific application within a persona. In my office persona, for example, I may have a manager role, a mentor role, an employee role, and so on.
But a person is the sum of all of their personas, and there should be a term for that. Last fall, when I first presented this taxonomy, I used the term “identity” for the all-encompassing entity. Andre Durand, from PingID who also drafted a taxonomy, used “personal identity” for this top-level construct. Neither, though, struck me as a good term because of the possibility of confusion with the entire realm of identity management. It would be like using a term to define itself. I made a mental note at the time to revisit this issue and placed it on my mental “stack.” Like a CPU’s stack, the mental stack is a First In-Last Out (FILO) device with one major difference: it’s possible for things to fall off the bottom of the mental stack. That’s what happened to the time level term in my taxonomy. Recent events emanating from down under have managed to resurrect the note, though, and (remarkably) place it at the top of the stack. (Note to systems designers: find out the mechanism for this and revolutionize computing.)
First, I was invited to present a session on “Taxonomy, Hierarchy and Structure” at the Identity and Access Management conference in Sydney next month (https://www.marcusevans.com/events/CFEventinfo.asp?EventID=7748). Then, just a week or so ago, I had a note from a reader in Canberra who had some thoughts about the taxonomy I presented last fall.
Allan Milgate has been involved in identity management for a long time, and I read his thoughts with interest. I especially paid attention when he said, “It is important to ensure we all ‘talk the same language’. I find the most common mistakes are to confuse Entity and Identity.” Allan was talking about that top level (the one Durand called “personal identity,” the sum of all the personas) but for a moment I was confused at his use of the term identity. That convinced me we needed a new term, one heretofore not associated with identity management, to stand for the sum of all identity information about a particular person.
“Gestalt” is a term most often met in psychology. It can be defined as a “pattern of elements so unified as a whole that its properties cannot be derived from a simple summation of its parts.” So “identity gestalt,” or the “identistalt” suggests itself.
Prosopography is a term in sociology for a method of defining a society or a culture by the relationships of the various characters or people within that society or culture, just as the top level identity is defined by the relationships of the roles and personas. The term derives from the Greek word for person, “prosop.” Prosodentity and prosopid are possibilities, then.
Now I want to hear your ideas. Send me suggestions for a term (with its derivation, just in case that isn’t clear to me) and you may find yourself immortalized – or at least mentioned in a future newsletter.
