Anyway

Phil Karlton said (at least once in my hear­ing any­way) that nam­ing things was one of the two hard tasks in com­puter sci­ence (read­ing X Toolkit Intrins­ics — C Lan­guage Inter­face, to which he con­trib­uted, will give you some idea why he said it); I dis­covered the truth of this yet again when writ­ing the FAQ for our Iden­tity Pro­vider for Open­ID. In this case, it was even more con­vo­luted, being about what to name the thing that names names.

When a Sun employ­ee signs up at the Sun IdP there is no neces­sity for them to put their real names in the fields marked “first name” and “sur­name”; they can use a fic­ti­tious name if they choose (or put noth­ing at all). In com­mon Eng­lish, this fic­ti­tious name is often called a pseud­onym. The vari­ous dictionary.com defin­i­tions of pseud­onym would seem to fit this usage very well, so I was pre­par­ing to use it in the FAQ. Except for, it turns out that those steeped in iden­tity man­age­ment ter­min­o­logy tend to find that plain-Eng­lish usage of the word confusing. 

In SAML, for example, a pseud­onym is defined as A pri­vacy-pre­serving name iden­ti­fi­er assigned by a pro­vider to identi­fy a prin­cip­al to a giv­en rely­ing party for an exten­ded peri­od of time that spans mul­tiple ses­sions; can be used to rep­res­ent an iden­tity fed­er­a­tion. In Liberty Alli­ance work, the defin­i­tion is An arbit­rary iden­ti­fi­er assigned by the iden­tity or ser­vice pro­vider to identi­fy a Prin­cip­al to a giv­en rely­ing party so that the name has mean­ing only in the con­text of the rela­tion­ship between the parties. The same or sim­il­ar mean­ing is used with­in WS-Secur­ity (the user iden­tity [is] provided in a SAML asser­tion as a pseud­onym) and WS-Fed­er­a­tion (A pseud­onym ser­vice allows a prin­cip­al to have dif­fer­ent ali­ases at dif­fer­ent resources/services or in dif­fer­ent realms, and to option­ally have the pseud­onym change per-ser­vice or per-login).

So in order to make life easi­er for those poor, eas­ily con­fused iden­tity man­age­ment experts, I’ll be using the term “fic­ti­tious name” in the FAQ, where I would oth­er­wise have used “pseud­onym”, an added cost of one let­ter and one word per usage. I hope they appre­ci­ate my efforts to help them.