If you go to Scirus and search for “identity management” you get a picture of what research and development has been going on in this field. The term returns 81,497 results–but only 321 of those results are academic journal publications containing the phrase in the title, abstract or text, and only 592 of those results are patents. This total is amazingly low, and I don’t know what to make of it. Of the 592 patents, 551 have been filed since 2002. Of the 321 journal publications, 286 were published since 2002. Compared with totals for other sub-sectors, it is clear that we are at the birth of a field–which I confess I did not know. My education continues…