Digital Identity is fundamental to collaboration in bioinformatics research and development because it enables attribution, contribution, publication to be recorded and quantified.
However, current models of identity are often obsolete and have problems capturing both small contributions "microattribution" and large contributions "mega-attribution" in Science. Without adequate identity mechanisms, the incentive for collaboration can be reduced, and the utility of collaborative social tools hindered.
Using examples of metabolic pathway analysis with the taverna workbench and myexperiment.org, this talk will illustrate problems and solutions to identifying scientists accurately and effectively in collaborative bioinformatics networks on the Web.