Ianum Core Concepts
If you have read our Getting Started section, you are probably already familiar with Gate. A Gate is like a door you place in front of a website. That door is managed by Ianum and a user will have to prove his identity to open it. While opening, there can be a series of actions (according to your needs) that a user can do, for example:
Provide one or more Personal Data you have decided, such as First name or Email.
Accept or Refuse agreements, such as Terms & Conditions, Marketing consensus, Privacy Policy.
A Gate is owned by an Entity, and this brings to the next key term.
There are two types of entities: private and group.
Private: Each user is a private entity. When you activate for the first time your smartphone putting your phone number, you created your personal entity. It represents a single person inside Ianum.
Group: if you want to create a company profile, an entity group is what you need to create. An entity group is a way to group two o more private entities.
In this way Ianum can be used both by single users to protect their data and identities, and by groups or organizations, to access as a team and not as individual users.
It's the entity created by customers using regional endpoints. It's not an entity associated with a real user but it can associated with him later thanks to a specific procedure.
When an entity enters in a Gate for the first time, a Subscription is created. A subscription is like an agreement between an Entity and a Gate, and defines that relationship. It is unique and stores inside what the user decided to share with the gate (first name, last name, ...) as well as any other relevant data.
We suggest to use the id of the Subscription to create an unique user ID in your system, and NOT the id of the Actor. More details can be found in the Actor section below.
When a user accesses a Gate to protect his privacy, the gate won't be able to see his Entity id, but the Actor id. An actor is the anonymisation of the user when he accesses a specific gate. The Actor id will always be the same for a user accessing a specific gate.
In short, an Actor is the person that signs the subscription when it's first made, as well as the person that can access a website for which he has a subscription.
If at a first glance having Subscription and Actor can be redundant, that is true for an Entity Private accessing a gate. If you are thinking to an Entity Group accessing a gate, the subscription will be the agreement between that Group (aka company) and the Gate. The Subscription will be signed by an Actor that is part of that Entity Group. Plus, in an Entity Group there are usually more Actors: in this way there is the possibility for a Gate to track who is using the service on behalf of the Company.
Currently only Private Entities can access a Gate, but in the future also Group Entities will be able to access. A Gate owner will be also able to block access to Group Entities, but we suggest to track customers based on Subscription ID, and use the Actor ID as a track of the person behind the screen, part of that Entity Group.
Each time an entity access a Gate, an Access is made. A list of Accesses for a specific Actor will tell you how many time that actor entered in your website. The same can be done with Subscriptions: given an id Subscriptions you can know how many times that subscription created an access to your website in a specific period of time.
