Carly Huitema
Carly Huitema helps lead the strategic design and development of Agri-food Data Canada at the University of Guelph, a cross-sectoral platform for research data and analytics. Her work focuses on improving the accessibility, interoperability, and usability of agri-food data across academia, government, and industry.
She also contributes to decentralized digital infrastructure as Co-Chair of the Steering Committee at the Trust over IP Foundation, where she supports the development of frameworks for digital trust, decentralized identity, and interoperable data ecosystems.
Carly holds a PhD in Microbiology from the University of British Columbia and previously worked in Switzerland with a medical diagnostics start-up. Her multidisciplinary experience spans data science, regulatory frameworks, and project management, which she applies to advancing trusted, decentralized approaches to data sharing.
Session
Self Addressing Identifiers (SAIDs) provide a decentralized, content based method for verifying the integrity of structured data and metadata. By hashing an object’s content and embedding the result back into the object, SAIDs allow anyone to independently confirm authenticity without relying on a central authority. This session introduces the principles behind SAIDs, explains how they complement traditional identifiers like DOIs, and highlights their advantages for workflows requiring immediate, verifiable integrity checks. Real world adoption at Agri Food Data Canada (ADC) demonstrates how SAIDs can be embedded into schema writing tools, enabling each schema version to carry its own built in proof of integrity. The session also covers the newly registered urn:said namespace at IANA, which supports interoperability across systems. Participants will learn how to generate SAIDs, integrate them into infrastructures, and apply them to enhance trustworthy, standards based metadata practices.