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Identity & Ownership

Every AI Product must have a clear identity and declared ownership.
Without identity, it cannot be trusted or governed.
Without ownership, it cannot be held accountable.

Why Identity & Ownership Matter​

  • Traceability → Consumers must know which product they are using.
  • Accountability → Ownership establishes responsibility for governance and compliance.
  • Discoverability → Identity is the anchor for catalogs and marketplaces.
  • Trust → Declared ownership builds confidence among consumers and regulators.

Identity Requirements​

An AI Product must declare:

  • Product Name → A unique, human-readable name.
  • Product ID → A persistent, machine-readable identifier (URI/UUID).
  • Version → Semantic version number (aligned with Lifecycle & Versioning).
  • Description → Human-readable summary of the product.
  • Category / Capability Type → E.g., LLM, vision classifier, agent.
  • Tags / Keywords → For discovery and classification.

Ownership Requirements​

An AI Product must declare:

  • Product Owner → Individual or organizational entity accountable for lifecycle and governance.
  • Maintainers → Technical maintainers responsible for operations and retraining.
  • Contact Information → Support and escalation channels.
  • Organization → Legal or corporate entity that provides the product.

Ownership must include governance accountability:

  • Who approves retraining.
  • Who enforces prohibited uses.
  • Who ensures compliance with laws and policies.

Provenance​

Identity must include lineage of creation, including:

  • Source Models → Pre-trained models, assets, or data products used.
  • Contributors → Individuals, teams, or organizations involved.
  • Date of Creation → When the product was first released.
  • Change History → Key events across versions.

Example​

AI Product: "Enterprise Sentiment Analyzer"

  • Product ID: urn:aiprod:enterprise-sentiment:v1.2.0
  • Version: 1.2.0
  • Owner: AI Governance Lead, ACME Corp.
  • Maintainers: NLP Engineering Team.
  • Provenance: Fine-tuned BERT model on customer-feedback-v2024.05 dataset.
  • Contact: support@acme.ai

Summary​

  • Identity ensures traceability and discoverability.
  • Ownership ensures accountability and governance.
  • Provenance ensures trust and reproducibility.

Principle: An AI Product without identity and ownership is not a product — it is an orphaned asset.