YADIS in one sentence

[Martin Atkins]

David Recordon wrote:
> It isn't just identity though.  Really it is just service discovery,
> whether that be for identity as we talk about it today, identity as in
> FOAF, or any other resource a web site might provide such as RSS feeds.
> 

I suppose it really depends on what you mean when you say "identity".

In YADIS, a URL serves as the identifier for an entity which is usually
a person. A web site also has an identity which happens to be a URL.

How do I indicate to an application what entity I want to operate on? I
give its identity URL. It doesn't matter whether that entity is a
person, a website or a wooly mammoth. The application can then figure
out what kind of thing it's dealing with in terms of what operations it
supports.

I've got no problem with the marketing one-liner featuring the word
"identity", since that's the big application right now and it's easy to
clarify if an interested party has further questions.