Identification

In the context of the OWIN Framework identification means identifying the entity (person, computer, organization etc) that sent the request that is being processed by the web application. There are many ways to identify the origin of a request that can involve using tokens, cookies, shared secrets, encryption, electronic signatures and certificates.

Some web applications do not need identification to function properly because they return the same information to all callers, but even in this case you might want to track visitors to your site to gather analytic information. The majority of web sites will have one identification mechanism (very often using cookies). Some web sites will support multiple identification mechanisms or require different identification mechanisms for different kinds of request. All of these scenarios are fully supported by the OWIN Framework which can divide the URL space of your application using routing and configure different identification middleware on different routes, or define multiple instances of the same middleware on different routes with different configurations.