Portability of digital goods is not easy. For example, digital music is not portable (at least not easily) – someone looking to move their music from Spotify to Apple Music learns this the hard way. Same for digital photos and other digital goods.
Portability in the context of digital documents means the ability for end users to control their digital asset. This can be understood when we compare ‘physical’ world documents to the ‘digital’ world. In the physical space, once a document is issued to an individual, s/he does not need the ‘issuer’ any further to control the document. In other words, the end user has full control over their physical document. A drawback in the physical world is that authenticity of these physical documents is tedious and time consuming. It was the authenticity problem that digital documents set out to solve.
Digitizing the document did make authentication easier. However, it introduced another ‘middleman’ – the service provider – that has to be in the loop in the authentication process as well as the document storage process. Moverover, the end user is not in full control over their documents as they reside within the data storage of the service provider. Imagine this issue getting compounded with different vendors hosting different documents for the user – how can the end user get all their documents — issued by different vendors — in one location?
DigiLocker solves this problem in an elegant manner. As an open platform, issuers may use its API’s and issue documents to the end user. End users can retrieve the documents using an AADHAR/mobile registration process. Backed up by the sovereign guarantee of the Government of India, DigiLocker is a free resource to the citizens of India.
Using DigiLocker as the ‘portability’ layer, different issuers can issue documents to the same user and they will show up in the same account for the user! Indeed a simple and elegant way to achieve interoperability. As long as the document has a URI, it may be located in a database, a blockchain, or another manner — that document is still accessible via DigiLocker. This allows innovation at the issuer side as well.
To learn how educerts provides DigiLocker integration, contact us at sales@educerts.net