Organizing principles for identity systems:
105 years of person schema (2005/1/26)
Intriguingly, the first general-purpose person schema used in
automated data processing was designed to collect data on every
individual in the US. It developed for the 1890 census, and
the resulting punchcard entries processed by Hollerith tabulators.
The entries contained more than a dozen attributes and counted
62 million people. (Earlier US census schemas primarily captured
data only about heads of households).
