Title:	DIGITAL IDENTITY: HOW TO BE SOMEONE ON THE NET
Author(s):	Toby Baier , Christian Zirpins , Winfried Lamersdorf
ISBN:	972-98947-0-1
Editors:	António Palma dos Reis and Pedro Isaías
Year:	2003
Edition:	2
Keywords:	Personal Communication, Distributed co-operation, Digital Identity, Virtual Communities.
Type:	Short Paper
First Page:	815
Last Page:	820
Language:	English
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Paper Abstract:	Personal communication and collaboration has been and still is a major driver of the Internet. A severe drawback in human centric electronic interaction is the fuzziness of the image that the co-operation partners have of each other (i.e. their respective “identities”) – especially in different and varying application contexts. This uncertainty adversely affects increasingly important “soft” co-operation factors like, e.g., trust and social behavior, and should therefore be minimized whenever possible. In addition, the lack of a homogenous representation of digital identities results, even at the system-level, in many cases in increased and unnecessary administration tasks – like, e.g., keeping track on user-ids and passwords or typing the same information several times. This makes communication inefficient and error-prone and may introduce various privacy threats. On the other hand, neither the minimal identity representation which is already used at the system’s level (e.g. a user-id used for security reasons), nor the emerging proprietary efforts for identifying users uniquely at the application level (e.g. for “single sign on” purposes) suffice for comprising the user’s identity fully as needed for co-operation of individual human beings. In order to cope with such problems of proper electronic user “identification”, we propose an open and generic notion of a digital identity that is generally applicable and includes an extensible set of identity facets on the system- as well as the user-level. Such a unique digital identity for all possible Internet communication and co-operation tasks enables users to recognize distinct co-operation partners uniquely in many different contexts – but also allows for revealing individual (i.e. only partial) views on such information whenever necessary. Therefore, such a facility enriches communication by semantic information about co-operation partners and thus enables faster, more secure and trustworthy collaboration. In summary, this paper proposes the concept of a digital identity and specifies what challenges are to be met when building an open, distributed, decentralized system infrastructure for digital identities.
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