G-Profile: A Hybrid Solution for Extended Identity Management in the Field of Personalized Service Provision

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.