Reasoning on personal identifiers: A guideline for design and maintenance

Countries around the world have established different practices when designing, implementing and maintaining their identification systems to keep a registry of all their population. On analyzing the features of many of these systems, one can clearly recognize the unique personal identifier particularities in each setup. In this paper, we intend to reason about the design decisions related to the personal identifier, considering it as an attribute of an individual and prepared to be used in a wide range of applications, from daily social interactions to e-gov and banking.