G-Profile

Abstract

In the digital world, many organizations are developing different applications (with different purposes) where users are generally represented by a heterogeneous set of attributes. From time to time, depending on the context, different attributes can provide different digital identities for the same user, often involved in the identification/authentication processes. In the personalized service provision perspective, the scope of identity management becomes much larger, and takes into account information susceptible to change such as user profile information as a whole. Many purely user-centric identity management systems has emerged in the few last years, among them the Higgins project that provides the user with a direct control over his/her data and covers some data security issues. However, a complete user-centric view of extended user identity management is not realistic, in our opinion. In this paper, the authors present G-Profile: a hybrid, open, general-purpose and flexible user modeling system for extended identity management in multi-application environments. G-Profile also tackles the trade-off between users’ and applications’ requirements.