The Laws of Identity define the architecture for what we call the Identity Metasystem.

The Identity Metasystem is an interoperable architecture for digital identity that assumes people will have several digital identities based on multiple underlying technologies, implementations, and providers. Using this approach, not only will individuals be put in control of their identity, but organizations will be able to continue to use their existing identity infrastructure investments, choose the identity technology that works best for them, and more easily migrate from old technologies to new technologies without sacrificing interoperability with others.

This paper starts from the conclusions reached in “The Laws of Identity”; it presents an open and interoperable architecture for building the metasystem, and it describes Microsoft's plans to participate in the identity metasystem. (12 printed pages)

Browser version . Printable PDF. Word.

The ideas presented here were refined here in the Blogosphere; in several years of work with the InfoCard, Identity and Access, and Web Services teams at Microsoft; and in meetings with many other identerati across many milieux.

The discussion of the metasystem continues and our documents will be updated periodically to reflect this.