What is the AcIS ID System?

In general, what does the term ID System mean?

• There's no clearly defined and agreed upon boundary of what is inside an ID System and what is not.
  (The question, "What is an ID System?" is in this way analogous to the question "What is an operating system?")
• An ID System must include:
  • Person data; this might include name, ssn, address, courses being taken.
  • Electronic IDs assigned to each person, with passwords
  • Password management utilities for electronic IDs
  • An interface for applications to perform authentication
• An ID System may also include:
  • A unix account infrastructure
  • A whitepages directory of people, addresses, phone numbers, etc.
  • An interface for applications to perform authorization
  • Distribution of the associated data to other organizations
  • Management of monetary transactions associated with this data
  • Tools for users and technical support to manage all of the above

What does the AcIS ID System look like?

The AcIS ID System includes all of the above. It provides an electronic ID, called a UNI, to each member of the Columbia community; this includes over 500,000 students, faculty, staff, alumni, and members of affiliated institutions.

Data Collection

Or see a more colorful picture

AcIS receives person data from roughly 150 sources. This data is divided into feed entries. Each feed entry corresponds to one set of data about a person, and generally contains a first and last name, a social security number, a date of birth, department and title information, and a building address and phone number. A person may have many feed entries, and thus many names, many social security numbers, etc. When AcIS receives a new feed entry, feed processing software tries to determine if the new feed entry corresponds to a person who is already in the system. This matching is done based on name, social security number, and date of birth. It is impossible to do this matching with 100% accuracy, since data may be absent or may contain errors.