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PDS Architecture
A PDS is a new architectural component for the Internet. Its purpose is to give the individual user as much control as possible over who can see what aspects of their personal data. The challenge of course is that an individual's data is stored in thousands of databases distributed across the Internet, are stored under a wide variety of policies including access control rights, are described using few common data models, and cannot be accessed using common protocols.
Control. A PDS provides a central point of control for information about a person, including their interests, affiliations, friends, and so on. The PDS is a place where the user can control data flows between services that provide data about them, and services that wish to consume it. In some cases the data itself flows directly between the data source and the data consumer, while in others the data flows through the PDS as an intermediary. In some cases the PDS is the originating source of the data.
Data Management. In cases where data flows from or through the PDS, we have the opportunity to map it into a normalized data model, provide the ability to see the data values, and in some cases be able to edit and update it.
Discovery. A PDS supports a discovery API that allows the user to be discoverable by other people, organizations, apps and exchanges when the incoming inquiries meet criteria the user specifies.
Interoperability. Each PDS is a peer that can exchange personal data with other PDS peers within a distributed network operated by a multiple organizations. Each PDS would be hosted by a trusted organization that acts on behalf of the individual, or be would be self-hosted. An individual's PDS would typically include links to objects stored in a friend's PDSes. These links, taken together, form a social graph that is distributed across the PDSes.
PDS
Information from a variety of data sources (e.g. social networks, telco and health data sources) are virtually integrated by the PDS and presented in a "dashboard" application in a browser or in desktop and mobile clients. The PDS gives you control over your own information by allowing you to share selected subsets of it with other people and organizations that you trust.
- Is a service that enables the user to participate as a peer within a distributed personal data ecosystem
- Provides an online profile manager web app that provides an integrated view of the user’s data, the ability update self-asserted data, a way to manage authorizations (e.g. using something like an UMA Authorization Manager) and set policies under which 3rd parties (e.g. apps) gain access to portion of the user’s information
- Implements a Discovery API that allows the user to be discoverable by other people, organizations, apps and exchanges whose inquiries that meet user-defined criteria
- Provides an identity provider (IdP) endpoint (e.g. OpenID OP, SAML, Infocard)
- Implements two factor authentication
- Provides a run-time environment for Kynetx-like apps that run within the PDS itself
- Decrypts data from the user's personal data stores (using a local key) to allow their attributes to be managed in the PDS's dashboard UI.
Attribute Data Service
Provides a data abstraction layer over both personal and managed data stores, mapping them into a common data model.
Personal data storage:
- Manages a set of locally stored personas (e.g. Work, Home & Friends, Citizen, Health, Anonymous)
- Provides an encrypted "lock box" in the cloud such that many kinds of data in the store (e.g. persona definitions) cannot be read by the store's operator
- Backs up personal data stored on your desktop and mobile devices
- Synchronizes personal data to other devices and computers owned by the person using a variety of network protocols.
- Links information from personas to accounts (profiles) that the user has at services providers, websites, social networking sites, etc. and over which the user has joint control and rights
- Links information from the user's personas with the personas of the user's friends and colleagues
Managed data storage
- Each external data service is represented as a context container within which are one or more persona objects and their attributes. For example the user's profile on Facebook could be represented as a persona object within a Facebook context. The user's friends would also be represented as other persona objects link to the user's persona object.
3rd Party Apps
These include:
- Exchange. A kind of PDS App that is involved in creating personal data exchanges analogous to a stock exchange. An exchange itself is a platform that supports yet another layer of apps above it [this is not shown above].
- Data Refinery. A kind of PDS App that reads datasets from the PDS, refines them, and writes them back to the PDS user. The refinery process includes analytics, inferencing, segmentation, etc. Refineries generally to create higher value, more refined data from the more raw forms of data, while often also making the data sets less personally identifying.
Active Clients
Shown at the top left of the diagram above are Windows, Mac and mobile active clients. Active clients are optional components that can be downloaded from the Web-based PDS portal and provide additional capabilities.
- Data capture. Since the client is integrated with the browser it can capture information about the user (e.g. data entered into Web forms, etc.) as they browse the Web.
- Web augmentation. It can also augment the user's web experience via web augmentation (overlaying context-specific information within the browser) and automatic form filling (e.g. filling in passwords).
- Security. The client can add a measure of anti-phishing protection from malicious websites.
- Privacy. Personal data is encrypted on the client before transmission to the cloud-based personal data store using a key that is unknown to the cloud-based personal data store operator.
Common Data Model
Data that is either created by the user and stored on the PDS or passes through the PDS intermediary on its way from the data source to the data consuming service can, in many cases, be mapped into a rich, common data model. This allows it to be consistently displayed (and in some cases edited) to the user irrespective of its original source. The common data model being developed for the purpose of representing people and their social networks is called the Persona Data Model 2.0.
People play different roles and share different subsets of their social graphs and attributes depending on who they are interacting with. For this reason a single person is represented as a set of partial identities that are used in different situations. The heart of the model used by the personal data store and managed data stores is based on a set of containers called contexts. Each context holds a partial digital identity called a persona. Each persona instance has a set of attributes and values. The contexts, personas and attributes adhere to the Higgins Persona Data Model 2.0.
These contexts are usually displayed as digital card metaphors in a user interface. A context/card could hold the attributes of a person's driver's license, home address, credit card. They might simply hold a verified assertion that a person is over 21 years of age. Contexts may also be about the user's friends and colleagues.
The user can choose to collect sets of these cards (partial identities) into a persona-set. For example the user could group together a home address card, an AMEX credit card, a proof of age-over-21 and a card holding a set of "shopping friends" into an "eCommerce" persona. This is done by tagging each of these cards with the "eCommerce" label. When the user goes to a new eCommerce site, it can "project" (either by form filling or something more sophisticated!) the minimal set of required attributes from these "eCommerce" cards to the site without tedious data entry.
If the user desires, they can give a semi-permanent (revocable) permission to the relying site, app or system to be able to access an approved set of attributes. The user can basically send a "pointer" to these cards to the relying site. The relying site can dereference the pointer and read (and in some cases update) selected attributes.
Components
Personal Data Service
- Planned for Higgins 2.0. We developed something similar in Higgins 1.1. called the Cloud Selector. It was similar in that it was a pure web app and it was a client of the attribute service.
Attribute Data Service
- Attribute Data Service 2.0 - data abstraction layer over a personal data store and external (managed) data stores
PDS Client
- PDS Client 2.0 - A library used to access the Attribute Data Service 2.0. It is incorporated into the PDS as well as PC and mobile active clients.
Auth Service
- Authentication Service 2.0 - An OAuth web service that authenticates PDS users and returns an access token that is relied on by the PDS Agent and the PDS Vault.
IdAS
- Higgins 1.1: See Higgins 1.1 Plan#IdAS_Solution_1.1
- Higgins 1.0: IdAS Solution 1.0: a basic configuration of the Identity Attribute Service 1.0 (IdAS). IdAS is a java framework that provides a common interface to identity, profile, and relationship data from external data sources (e.g. websites, databases, directories).
XDI4J
- Higgins 1.1: XDI4j 1.1 - XDI4J is a java library for working with XDI.
Data Models
Data models used in Higgins code and services:
