Further to my note on standards below, Jon Udell has some interesting remarks on standards of interest to us in a recent post.
I was reminded of the twin themes of this column — digital identity and the semantic web — when Sean McGrath pointed to John Sowa’s essay The Law of Standards which states:
Whenever a major organization develops a new system as an official standard for X, the primary result is the widespread adoption of some simpler system as a de facto standard for X.
My guess is that we’ll see a de facto alternative to the W3C’s proposed semantic-web standards — Web Ontology Language and RDF. Likewise, having spent more hours than I care to admit poring over specs and architecture diagrams from the Passport, Shibboleth, Liberty, and WS-Federation projects, I suspect (as does Doc Searls) that some other identity standard will prevail. [Jon’s Radio]
