What is a Profile?

Just like in the online world a person can have many accounts for work and personal reasons, within Vereign, the idea of all these different accounts is represented by the term Profile. Similar to the different accounts, a user can have different profiles for various occasions. For example, Friends, Work, Government, Banking, etc. By choosing a profile, a user selects a specific window into their identity, rights and keys to use.

The Profile represents a connection endpoint for the users, known as entities, to interact and exchange information within the system. Another word which can be used to describe the notion of a profile is identity. As one entity can have many identities, it can also have many profiles.

A single Profile contains a specific list of claims(data for that person) that an entity has created. Only an entity of a type of person, asset or organisation can extend itself and have a profile. Furthermore it can be extended with the ability to have documents and emails attached to it.

Example: If you have two profiles Friends and Business and those profiles are containing different information for you, like

Friends contains :

  • Picture
  • Your name
  • Address
  • Date of birth
  • Phone
  • Email

Business contains:

  • Your name
  • Phone
  • Email

This means using each of those profiles you will be sharing different information for you with the respective community.
When you sign an email(or document), the recipient will receive only the information from the profile which you have used.
If you sign an email with profile Friends the recipients will see all the Claims which that profile contains. With the example above recipients will see :

  • Picture
  • Your name
  • Address
  • Date of birth
  • Phone
  • Email

To learn how to use your profiles, refer to How Do I Manage My Profiles.