Purpose

Original Purpose
To create a web catalogue of identity-related ontologies (schemas) in order to promote interoperability between identity systems through ontology reuse. --from http://wiki.idcommons.net/moin.cgi/IdentitySchemasCharter

Proposed Revision to Purpose
To promote interoperability between identity systems by making it easier to find, understand, and reuse the semantics of identity attributes defined in existing schemas.

Original Guiding Principles
1. We will not define new schemas or attributes. The goal is to catalogue existing ones and, where possible, create cross references. 1. We will will encourage peer production and community involvement. 1. We will invent as little as possible.

Proposed Guiding Principles V2
1. We will not define new schemas nor attributes, other than metadata to bootstrap describing the schema or attribute itself. 1. We will define how existing forms of schema or attribute identifiers that aren't URIs can be mapped into URIs and resolved into URLs of documents that describe the schema or attribute. For the XDI dictionary model, will assign XRIs in the XRI dictionary space (the global context symbol "+"). 1. We will catalogue existing schemas or attributes and describe their semantics using a small set of metadata formalisms. Note: Defining this set is TBD. In discussions, members of this set have so far included OWL-Full, HOWL (the Higgins dialect of OWL), and XDI. 1. We will, where possible, create cross references between attributes with the same semantics. In the XDI dictionary space, these will be formal XRI cross-references. 1. We will will encourage peer production and community involvement. 1. We will invent as little as possible.

Note: This group will predominately target "attribute" elements of schemas for metadata, however other kinds of schema elements (such as an LDAP object class) will also be considered.