Practical Metadata

I have been swamped the last few days assisting our developers on the Biometrics Automated Toolset (BAT) debugging and redesigning a distributed matching engine. Besides the critical nature of a rapid solution to fix bugs in a fielded system, it was great to be back coding. Those who know me, know that I never pass up an opportunity to code.
That brings up the issue of Biometrics metadata and person-centric metadata. On the subject of Biometrics data, there are multiple standards defined by NIST on biometric data. As for biometrics metadata it typically falls into a few types:

• person biographic information
• contextual information like a match from a matching engine
• contact information based on a screening

An important issue relating to biometrics is distinguishing between person and identity. I recently wrote an internal Oberon newsletter article that defined the two as follows:

• Person — a unique human being whose uniqueness is verifiable via unmodifiable characteristics.
• Identity — a set of human characteristics for asserting “person-hood”; often captured in credentials.

How you model these is critical and which one goes on a watchlist also has important ramifications to the actions that should be taken.

Biometrics metadata is one of my top candidates for important areas to focus on. Most people intuitively get the importance of data and metadata about people; however, as the person/identity issue points out ... we are still not modeling this category properly.