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In an idealized IAM system, the Person Identity Registry (PIR) has certain key functions and responsibilities with respect to other elements of the IT environment:
- It contains a set of demographic attributes for each person in its scope of coverage
- It draws person information from various line of business systems, AKA systems of record, information that is of interest or value to other systems and applications
- Where appropriate, it attempts to determine if multiple SoRs carry information of interest about a single person and it maintains those links
- It assigns and manages a persistent, unique, and preferably non name-based identifier for each person it carries. It is the sole authority for this identifier
- It maintains links between each person it carries and the specific records that correspond to that person in each connected SoR
- SoRs are authoritative for their own attributes, but all other systems rely primarily on the PIR as the authoritative point of access to those attributes
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