Digital identity matters

Abstract

Digital objects or entities present us with particular problems of an acute nature. The most acute of these are the issues surrounding what constitutes identity within the digital world and between digital entities. These are problems that are important in many contexts but, when dealing with digital texts, documents, and certification, an understanding of them becomes vital legally, philosophically, and historically. Legally, the central issues are those of authorship, authenticity, and ownership; philosophically, we must be concerned with the sorts of logical relations that hold between objects and in determining the ontological nature of the object; and historically, our concern centers around our interest in chronology and the recording of progress, adaptation, change, and provenance. Our purpose is to emphasize why questions of digital identity matter and how we might address and respond to some of them. We will begin by examining the lines along which we draw a distinction between the digital and the physical context and how, by importing notions of transitivity and symmetry from the domain of mathematical logic, we might attempt to provide at least interim resolutions of these questions.

Progress in information technology and tourism management: 20 years on and 10 years after the Internet—The state of eTourism research

“…This, in turn, facilitates consumer centric marketing or relationship marketing (Niininen, March & Buhalis, 2006). VTCs, however, may be at risk of losing members if their members are not satisfied with the content, design, security policies, and repercussions for non-compliance with community rules (Allison et al, 2005;Wang et al, 2002). The emergence of Web 2.0 or Travel 2.0 brings together the concept of Social networking/virtual communities and applies it to the tourism industry.…”

Authenticity: a red herring?

“…We argued in our earlier article, 'Digital Identity Matters', [1] that when the same bit pattern is sent through the rendering mechanisms on two computers, there are many ways in which the perceived result may be different-thus making the first assumption unreliable. As a relatively trivial but common example of the second case, some copying processes change the date and time on a file (information that is stored in the file itself), and by so doing change the bit pattern stored.…”

“…The notion of identity in this context is important in relation to the sameness of such objects in time or place and also across the panoply of relationships that such objects can have to one another. This paper, like most other information objects, has a range of relationships to other papers, quoting from some, referring to others, agreeing with one, disagreeing with another and finally building on an earlier paper in which we first discussed the subject [1].…”

“…We soon discover that this task is by no means straightforward, with notions of version, rendition and performance all nuancing identity. 1 However, none of these notions are new in the digital world; our starting point must be to consider how identity is understood in the analogue world and then consider how migration to a digital world alters the way that we deal with the identity of information objects.…”

‘Nothing is the same as something else’: significant properties and notions of identity and originality

“…The structure, appearance and functionality of objects can all be at risk during migration, but even if some differences are introduced-or so the argument runs-this will be inconsequential if migration is carried out in such a way that no 'significant' loss occurs and the features necessary ''for digital objects to remain accessible and meaningful'' (Hockx-Yu and Knight 2008, p. 142) are preserved intact. Allison et al (2005) argued for a cautious approach, suggesting that digital curators need to devise ''auditable processes that ensure that the[se] features are not altered by the transformations of the bitstream'' (p. 371), but Thibodeau (2002) wrote with apparent confidence that ''it is possible to change the way a conceptual object is encoded … without having any negative impact on its preservation'' and that ''different digital encodings of the same conceptual object … can preserve … [its] essential characteristics''.…”