Digital Asset Grid - worth following in 2012 @petervan

This was a project I worked on for SWIFT*, lead internally by Peter Van Auwera  along with the Identity Gang: Gary Thompson, Doc Searls, Kaliya Hamlin, Drummond Reed, Andreas Weigend, Craig Burton, Mary Hodder, Don Thibeau, Scott David, and Peter Hinssen.

*SWIFT is the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications and is a global organization that each day handles financial transactions such as wire transfers for more than 9,000 banks, is preparing an expansion into data banking – helping to secure all types of digital exchanges.

The question: Can SWIFT succeed in doing what Microsoft and other tech titans famously failed to achieve and build something that is useful in the identity space? Microsoft tried to introduce something similar 10 years ago with its Passport and Hailstorm initiatives; Intel, Sun, Oracle and AOL attempted to develop such a service through a group called The Liberty Alliance

Background: Data is becoming a new type of raw material, on a par with capital and labour, according to a 2011 World Economic Forum report, Personal Data: The Emergence of a New Asset Class. Some of the largest Internet companies, including Google and Facebook reap most of the profits from collecting, aggregating, analyzing and monetizing personal data. Consumers have no control and little knowledge of what is being done with their data.

Scenario: It is desirable to put control and dissemination of personal data “back” into the hands of the individual. The idea is each person’s data would reside in an account where it would be controlled, traded and accounted for – much like a bank account. The services would be interoperable so that the data could be exchanged with other institutions and individuals globally. Users might even leverage their data in the same way money is leveraged for credit.

Trust: The WEF report says, “an essential requirement would be for the services to operate over a technical and legal infrastructure that is highly trusted.” That is where SWIFT comes in. It is a neutral organization that already operates a secure global network with an established legal framework, placing it in pole position to facilitate access to secure personal-data services.  SWIFT has a closed, highly reliable and secure network for interchange of money between the banks. The vision is that you could take that underlying infrastructure and make it more open and more interchangeable, and make it work between any entities.

The Proposal:  build a Digital Asset Grid as per the diagram. The arrows represent the new proposed SWIFT infrastructure service. This infrastructure would provide trusted and certified pointers to digital asset content and associated digital asset usage rights. An ecosystem of banks and other parties would build Digital Asset Services (blue boxes) that leverage this trusted infrastructure service. Users interact with the blue services and the underlying infrastructure via the selector and the weaver. The SELECTOR is a secure mechanism to manage the flow of claims. The WEAVER allows the “weaving” of digital assets with digital rights and the entities that receive those rights. Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

[The weaving concept was originally introduced at SIBOS in 2010: that talk can be heard here by Gary Thompson]

The Vision: The Digital Asset Grid is to move the SWIFT network and SWIFT services from a closed, single-purpose, and messaging-based system to an open, general-purpose, API-based system.

Next Steps: building a prototype in 2012 and finding a dance partner!

The web (if represented as a collection of pages) is based on some simple request-response mechanisms. I request a page and the server responds and gives me the page. End of that transaction. With the “dataweb” – a collection of Digital Assets and associated usage rights; there is a need for something where exchanging entities can perform a dance around and with the Digital Assets. And we want to be sure that they are who they say they are, and that they have the right usage rights to the digital assets. So we move from a two dimensional view of the world (in computer terms a “table”) to a multi-dimensional view (in computer terms a “graph”)

One of the many use cases for the Digital Asset Grid would be to solve compliance, Instead of moving messages from A to B, we keep the DATA where it originates and “point” to them with SWIFT certified pointers to where the data are located and the associated usage rights.

The dance protocol (full duplex) for this use case, from opening of the dance with (a “webhook” in technical terms), to the actual picking-up of the content, and closing the dance and everything in-between, could look like something like this:

·          PartyA: “hey, I am sending a signal that I wanna dance the tango (slang for payment instructions) with any party in the Swift dance hall at 9pm”

·          PartyB: “yep, I wanna dance with you, let’s meet in the SWIFT dance hall at the bar”

·          PartyA: “ok, here we are, cool place

”

·          PartyA: “Let’s get to business”

·          PartyA: “I just gave you following rights my payment instructions at this XRI: you have XDI pick-up rights”

·          PartyB: “ok, gotja. Will pick it up right away”

·          PartyB: “knock knock, I am coming to fetch those payment instructions”

·          PartyA: “let’s check if you have the usage rights….”

·          PartyA: “everything looks fine, go ahead”

·          PartyB: “loading, loading, loading…”

·          PartyB: “Ok I am done”

·          PartyA: “So am I”

·          PartyB: “tomorrow, same place same time to dance ?”

·          PartyA: “would love to

9pm again ?”

·          PartyB: “sure, bye bye”

·          PartyA: “bye bye”

 

I really enjoyed contributing to this project and it is a joy to work with a company that is open about innovation, the output and looking to engage at an early stage with the widest possible community. Well done @petervan and Kosta (@copernicc)