Getting to grips with 'identity' and 'username'
As most of you have probably heard, out here in California we have an election scheduled this October. There will be two questions on the ballot: 1) Should the current governor be removed? and 2) If he’s removed, who will replace him? I’m writing this newsletter before the list of candidates is finalized, but news reports indicate that there may be more than 300 names on the ballot (and you only can vote for one).
Among the people who will be on the ballot are Arnold Schwarzenegger (you know, the Terminator), the comedian known as Gallagher (the guy who breaks watermelons with a sledgehammer), and actor Gary Coleman (the diminutive fellow from “Different Strokes”). Also rumored to be mulling a place on the ballot are Michael Jackson, Steve Martin, Bill Murray and Bob Dole – but not the singer, comedian, actor or former senator. No, these are simply folks with the same name as those celebrities and who know that in any election, but especially a relatively short one (two months), name recognition is very important.
Recognizing the name, though, doesn’t mean recognizing the person, and that’s what “same name” candidates are counting on. It’s not a big stretch to think that if the Terminator can run (and you’ve seen him say so on TV), then Ghostbuster Bill Murray could also – just imagine him in the state capitol with his plasma gun!
OK, stop humming “Who ya gonna call?” and pay attention. The point I’m trying to make is that a name isn’t an identity, it’s simply one attribute of an identity, and attributes are rarely required to be unique. A combination of attributes might add up to an unique identity, but rarely would this be a small handful of values that were easily remembered or manipulated. Most identity systems rely on something else besides the name attributes of an object to provide the unique identifier required of every object in the database.
Most systems allow for an “username”, a combination of letters, letters and numbers, letters and symbols, or even letters, numbers and symbols that identify the object. Some require that a username be unique within the entire database, while others require only that it be unique within its own container and is linked with the container name to create an unique identity within the database.
The “identity”, then, is the unique combination, which exists as a one-to-one relationship with the object, while the “name” is simply one or more attributes that are linked from the object. The name may or may not identify the object, but the name is never the identity.
Next, we’ll look at an identity mechanism with no requirement for a name attribute.
