LEAP personality

Belongs to LEAP 2.0 > classes

Working definition
Describes one of the coherent and characteristic ways in which the portfolio holder sees, thinks, feels, and behaves.

"A coherent and characteristic way of seeing, thinking, feeling, and behaving" is the definition suggested by Rita Carter in her book "Multiplicity".

For the term 'persona', see Wikipedia: it is used by (the translations of) C.G.Jung with this kind of meaning; see e.g. Psychological Types chapter XI definition 48: paras 797 - 802. In para 798 the term 'personality' is used in general discussion; in paras 800 to 802 Jung describes his use of the term 'persona' for the outward-facing component of personality, and anima/animus or 'soul' for the inward-facing component.

Explanation
This concept is to do with personality and persona in the personal, psychological and social senses, and not with the concept of identity in the context of security infrastructure, authentication, or normal identity theft. It is not quite the same as the concept of persona as used in the design of systems and interactions, but closer to the concept of persona in psychology and communication.

One helpful way of understanding a personality may be as a pattern of patterns (See Pattern.) What falls into the pattern of a particular personality are behaviour patterns. Individual instances of behaviour could also be seen as characteristic of a personality, but only really in virtue of the fact that they are similar to other instances. Individual episodes of behaviour, if uncharacteristic, tend to be seen as aberrations. Note, however, that if one person has done a lot of imagining of another person's behaviour, then just one instance of that behaviour can look like evidence of the pattern. Much prejudice may work along these lines.

The class was previously called identity: identity theft usually refers to the misuse of small amounts of information, like name, address, identification numbers, and tokens such as cards. Rarely would a criminal actually attempt to adopt someone's personality.

Personality has been represented little if at all in portfolios, except in an implicit way. Just about any portfolio materials can be linked to some aspect of personality. Every time a presentation of oneself is constructed, whether using a portfolio approach or not, the selection of material for presentation says something about the personality that one wishes to project to the people for whom the presentation is intended.

One great power of this concept is that it can form the basis of a principled, coherent and comprehensible personal policy for personal information disclosure. Instead of the potentially arduous task of marking up each portfolio item with the people for whom viewing is allowed, along with the error-prone task of keeping these permissions up to date, one can more simply mark each item with the one or more personalities it relates to, and associate other people with the personalities that they are allowed to see information relating to. Effectively this would replace alternative ways of doing similar things, for example by having classes of other people, each of which is allowed to see certain things (e.g.. in a university context, admin staff, my tutors, my friends, others on my course, etc.) Such groups of people are just one aspect of the context of a personality.

Ideally, a portfolio system should be able to provide different URLs for an individual to use for different personalities.

Alternative terms, with nuances of meaning

 * Identity: liable to be taken in the technical sense.
 * Persona: also used in interaction design as a fictional idealised user - rather impersonal.
 * Personality: often taken to mean something more unitary about an individual.
 * Facet: the idea that each of one's ways of being is a facet of the whole person.
 * Aspect: usually used in a slightly different sense.
 * Mode: particularly with the idea of mode used for information technology, the phenomenon we are talking about is like the modes of a person.

Predicates
See the notes on LEAP triples for an explanation of what forms of triples there are, and how they are represented here.
 * "Direct" predicates are those where this class is in the domain of the predicate (but its superclass is not).
 * "Inverse" predicates, if given for reference, are those where the class is in the range, but not the domain, of the predicate.
 * "=" means the predicate expects a literal object: the type of literal may be specified here.
 * "&rarr;" means the predicate expects an object URL referring to an instance of the given class(es).
 * "&larr;" is used for inverse predicates, and means that triples may exist with instances of the given class(es) as subject and this class as object.

Inherited
from pattern

Direct

 * known as = the name (of the portfolio holder) associated with this personality: that is, the name by which the portfolio holder is known in these contexts

Subclasses
none

Other specs that use similar things
It would appear that no other specs represent this concept.

Existing places information held
Information relating to personality is held everywhere, but information encapsulating a personality currently appears to be limited to descriptive, unstructured text, in cases where the person has reflected on their personality in different contexts.

Issues
See also, a separate discussion of LEAP person identity.

A note can go here of any issues that are not represented above, which can then be discussed on the list or under the discussion tab.