 Okay great I'm Robert Peters, and I'm with Orchid. I'm the technology director for Orchid, and I wanted to cover identifying identities, Orchid, identities, and the blockchain. And so what's fun about this conference? There seems to be actually a pretty wide variety of people. There's technologists. There's admins here. There's people who know what blockchain is. There's people who have no clue what blockchain is. And so this presentation will kind of cover a little bit of a lot of different subjects. And just if you don't understand one thing just kind of bear with it and acronyms. We all hate them, but they're there. So what is Orchid the organization? First of all Orchid is an acronym. It's the open researcher contributor ID. We're an open nonprofit organization, and we're run by and for the research community. We provide researchers with a unique identifier, the Orchid ID, that reliably and clearly connects them with their research contributions and affiliations. And you'll see it, for example, URL. So that's an Orchid identifier, and there's our domain, and then there's a 16-dentate numeric ID that kind of identifies who that researcher is. And if you click that you'll, for humans, humans resolve to a record that kind of looks like a CV. It's not really a CV, but we'll have a list of works or different name variations that you won't recognize in your research activities. We have about 500 systems that have integrated Orchid ID, and that's growing quickly. And those general use cases would include grant applications, manuscript submissions, Chris systems, repositories. We've been talking with open pharma initiatives, you know. So it's a pretty general identifier useful for any academics, scholar, or research space. And so we use the term researchers a lot, but actually we include admins and we include other types of scholastic work. So I'm gonna say researcher a lot, but really it's a very inclusive term for us. So the researcher, typically how they interact with Orchid is an institution will ask them to authenticate their ID. And once that institution authenticates the ID, they can use it to collect information about the researcher and then attribute the researcher correctly in their metadata. And in ideal situations, that metadata gets pushed all the way to other systems that include publishers, employers, and funders, and eventually hopefully it gets into the Orchid record. And we see that nowadays with things called a cross-ref auto update where when people, when somebody publishes their work, they're notified by Orchid that it's been published before the publisher or anybody else has notified them because some of those systems work quick enough. Other systems don't, so you know, it's but we want to get there where it works that way for everybody. Okay, the technology this is gonna get exciting. The Orchid tech stack. We are a typical Java web app, J2E, so this is like a term that was popular 10 years ago, 20 years ago. The good news is though, we're open-source. We have a public API that's CC0, so any information the researcher chooses to share becomes CC0 and the researcher controls what information they share. And then we have a member API. And the member API allows our members to write to the API and then adds on a few other things like some information that the researcher may want to share with our membership and not the public and a few things that convenience like webhooks. Access to the record is controlled by the researcher, so the researcher gives permission to our members to read the record or push the information in the record and that's via OAuth2, another fun protocol. And finally, no short-term blockchain plans, so why am I here? Yeah, so I mean we're kind of earlier, we heard talk earlier about, hey, we just do a lot of this stuff in a centralized manner and that's great. Why don't we just get to it because nobody really cares, blah, blah, blah. And Orchid is one example of that working. But we are actually really excited for blockchain and if you want to understand why you got to read our vision statement, Orchid's vision is a world where all who participate in research, scholarship, innovation are uniquely identified and connected to their contributions and affiliations across time, disciplines and borders. So our mission is not Orchid is the entirety of everything. That's not what we want to do. Our mission is to make sure researchers are connected to their outputs. And so often I talk to people in a lot of blockchain people to you, they say, hey Rob, what's going on? I want to talk to you. We're doing something and we think Orchid looks like this. This is what they think Orchid looks like. I'm like, ah, okay. Well, let's talk some more. And the reality is Orchid is actually just part of researchers identity. So you have your university identity, you have a government identity, you have a LinkedIn, your social identity actually ends up being pretty important when it comes to research. Twitter, Orchid record, every time I look or I dissect the problem, there's one more researcher identity need, like, oh, I need credentials to access this equipment or access this collection of books. And so Orchid, we don't see ourselves as solving that problem alone. It's a community effort. And really, we need the community to kind of address all the different types of identity needs, just to name a few, is like, how do you correctly credential somebody's national identity or local university identity and their social identity needs. There's a lot of problems there that Orchid's actually never going to directly approach. So instead, what we do is we offer a researcher identifier and a record that can help connect researchers to their many identities and activities. And what that kind of looks like would be something like this. We'd really like to see the Orchid identifier used to help attribute metadata and all these systems out there and then have that metadata point to Orchid record and ideally vice versa. We want that metadata references in Orchid record that we can point back to the source of a lot of these things. Great. So now we've kind of covered the identifier and that's really the core of what Orchid does. But now let's talk a little bit about how that helps connect with other identifiers, mostly identifiers about research outputs. You have research papers, university affiliations, peer reviews, grants, equipment. Researchers do a lot of stuff. Conferences, right? We're at a conference. People are producing at conferences. How do you correctly attribute that researcher to it? And every time we look, there's yet another thing that probably needs attribution. So researchers are doing a lot of work out there and they're not getting attribution correctly. And this graph kind of shows a little bit of where we have good coverage. If we're talking about works, researcher actually Orchid via Crossref and other PID providers provides pretty good coverage. You can push a lot of different types of works at Orchid to have them correctly attributed. But when you get into equipment, the community's not there yet. So we're trying to facilitate building out infrastructure for attributing grant awards, equipment, peer reviews, researcher resources, which is a new one that's coming up. But there's always another thing we need to try to figure out how to connect and attribute researchers to. And currently, this is just a short-term roadmap of new things that, you know, most researchers are familiar with PID, such as a DOI, right? So I get a DOI, my paper is now official and they feel good about it. That's the extent. They know they can click this link and it resolves through their paper. But we're trying to help the community develop the same kind of infrastructure for affiliation types, researcher resources, and grant IDs. And there's all kinds of other things out there that we also need to connect to. And then I use the term PID and I was like, oh, wait a minute. Okay, there's lots of people that probably don't know what a PID is. And so I tried to think of the easiest explanation I could come up with. And it's a resolvable, actionable, durable identifier that can be used to locate and describe things. And typically we see this as URLs that exist forever. And from Orchid's viewpoint, we really like URLs that resolve to metadata for both machines and humans. So you see some that do one or the other, but we really want to do both well. And even beyond the activities that I've been referencing, there's lots of other things that we need to help connect researchers to. There's different profile systems, right? You have your NIH profile and you have your LinkedIn profile. You might have a profile on Scopus. And so depending upon what areas you are and what areas you move into, you definitely have more than a few profiles. How do we even connect a researcher to their Google search results? I mean, that kind of ends up being pretty important in the research community. So many types in the name, oh, wow, they pop up. Government identities, somebody brought up Researcher Gate earlier today. Like, well, how do we connect that kind of profile? And all kinds of stuff that really we need to help facilitate connecting to. And so when you look at the scope of the problem, I'm just kind of quickly described at a high level, it's huge. Like how do we connect all these things to researchers? And Orchid's viewpoint is it's a community effort. We can't go it alone. So we really need community initiatives to help make this happen. Which brings us right back to blockchain. And so here's interesting space. There's a lot of innovation going on and lots of possibilities for managing researcher identity and attribution of activities. And so why Orchid plus blockchain? Well, the value Orchid sees in it is it's immutable and distributed. And when we're talking about connecting researchers to activities or activities are everywhere. So I'm very distributed. So having distributed systems kind of correctly attribute to those things makes a lot of sense to us. And specifically, we really like the innovation we're seeing in the verified claims built on decentralized self-sovereign identifiers. And also like some of the initiatives we see around tracking researchers' activities with decentralized systems. And we really would like collaboration on new PIDs and PID infrastructure. And some of those could be addressed best with blockchain technologies. And so let's get down to the brass tacks. What are we really asking? Number one is if you're trying to attribute activities to researchers or attribute a researcher itself, use Orchid ID. And that may or may not link directly to the Orchid record. You could use Orchid ID in an internal system, external system. But the important thing is there is this ID out there where we're trying to make it easy to disambiguate who a researcher is. Add PID or PID-like resolution to researcher activities pushed to blockchain. So a lot of blockchain technology is very hard for people to understand. The tooling around it is very hard. You have to install Chrome extensions and buy coins and do all kinds of stuff. For the metadata, both for machines and humans, PID-like infrastructure, i.e. links that are persistent, and you can click and see what the link is describing, it's pretty easy for people to use. And so building that on top of your blockchain initiatives as a way of having easy resolution is something Orchid's really interested in promoting. And then finally, if you want all the gold stars, push references to your PIDs to the Orchid record. So if you've developed a blockchain and you're pushing this stuff to the blockchain and then you have a way of resolving it via a link that is PID or PID-like, push it to the Orchid record, and that makes it easier for the researcher to find it, it makes it easier for other systems to resolve the ID, get metadata about the researcher and say, oh, hey, here's this little tidbit of information. Maybe I should follow this PID to the source, which probably has, you know, information that has the granularity you need for what you're describing on the blockchain. And so as you guys are out there creating innovation in the researcher community, we just ask you to consider the ways you can interface with Orchid, collaborate with us and kind of help the whole community disambiguate and attribute researchers correctly. And that is it. Any questions? So I have one question or one statement. So thank you very much for clarifying the difference between identity and identifier. And I mean, we have to solve the problem of identity. If we don't solve this problem, then we don't need to talk about blockchain and the advanced concepts that we want to archive, like money distribution, maybe pseudonymous publications and all this stuff, right? Yeah. And this brings me to another thing. Identity fires are fine, but at the moment there's no high pressure on them to be really one single identity, right? Orchid, you almost call identity because there's no incentive to create 20 or 30 Orchid IDs by, you know, as soon as we start to distribute money, put economic pressure on something, there might be much more incentives to create socket puppets like fake identities, right? And are there like how many people check whether this is a real person at Orchid? Well, nobody checks if it's a real person. So we can just like create, I can create 20 Orchid IDs. That is possible. Yeah. So I know my friends at ResearchCade that they like, they have like people looking into identities, right? So that you don't create fake identities, right? Well, the... Because they have another interest there, right? The differences is right, Orchid. There's a couple different ways we approach the issue. Number one is we have members, and the members can authenticate an Orchid identifier and push information to the record. So yeah, if a researcher asserts they work somewhere, yeah, that's great, but if their institution writes to the record, that institution, that helps you identify the person. Exactly, yeah. And then additionally, you know, when you get into credentialing government credentials or you really want that really thousand percent solid, somebody showed up at a desk with a passport and, I don't know, your electric bill and some kind of proof of who you are. What I'd really like to see is, I'd like to see initiatives where somebody builds a tooling to push those things through the blockchain and provide references to the Orchid record like, hey, if you want that kind of proof, here's a PID, follow this link on the PID, that PID is going to describe the person and this is how, it should also describe how you prove it via the blockchain tooling. So right, if you're using sovereign self-identity, here's a link that I click and I go off the Orchid record and I see some data, oh, look, there really is some kind of blockchain, some kind of sovereign self-identity and if I want to prove it myself, this is a trust note I go to verify that fact, right? That tooling is in development in the blockchain community so Orchid's asking for references to things like that to be pushed to the record, but we're never going to approach doing identity in ourselves, right, because we're in all the countries in the world in one facet or another and then we get into regional problems, local problems and it's not, the goal of Orchid is to provide an identifier to help with disambiguation and attribution, not the end-all to identification, so really that's a perfect space for blockchain to approach a problem. Yeah, sorry, this was not like, you never advertise that you're doing that so that's completely right, but it makes complete sense, so we have to work together with other entities that basically do it anyways, publishers, research institutes, social networks, yeah? Yep, yep, and so we're always out there trying to get direct relationships with membership who can push metadata to the record so if you need a source from publisher let's forget the publisher, let's go to the journal level, you can get attribution at the journal level, great, then somebody goes and looks at your record, they're going to understand what's going on. Thanks, great. It was almost the same argument, so mentioning this concept of self-sovereign identity, verifiable claims, the W3C community draft about this and so on, the response that I got felt almost hostile, so in the meantime they developed something and I'm super glad about this, this really sums up and one more concrete question or suggestion, how about as a first step, so to say, have dedicated fields in the ORCAT record for crypto addresses so that you can store certain public keys in your profile to make it easier to have a machine-readable verification of claims and things on-chain? Yeah, that's definitely something that we're always actively looking at. One metric, though, is actual researcher uptake and is always kind of a hard metric to pass on some of those things, but yeah, we're always iterating on what metadata can be pushed to the record and you can push person identifiers, we're a person identifier, you can push other person identifiers and so if you have a credential and you frame it as a person identifier, there's no place for that, and of course you have to click it to go off and see it, but yeah, and then we're also pushing into some cryptographic pattern so stuff like that, so the iteration in ORCAT, we're always trying to grow, we're always trying to improve and we're open to collaboration. Further questions? Otherwise, thank you very much again.