I just glanced at that quickly, but it seemed to suggest the possibility of a distributed system. If there is some service somewhere, for example, I really ought to be able to give it my URI, and have it link to my personal profile information (publications and such). I also ought to be able to associate it with other, similar, sort of profile/identifiers; like, say, an Open Library contributor profile.

As I’ve said more than once, a centralized system will fail.

Aside: the gendered language of that primer (”… given that a researcher has registered with CrossReg to claim his profile (and in the process supplied proof that he is who he claims to be), he could then associate …”) is pretty off-putting. Someone really ought to clean that up.

If, OTOH, it’s HTTP URI-based and distributed a la OpenID, then I’d be more interested.

Which is it?

To get a sense of what I’d like to see more generally, you can try (though I need to add some triples to point to my pubs):

curl -H "Accept: application/rdf+xml" http://bruce.darcus.name/about#me .