The development of the Internet was originally based on the assumption that users remain anonymous. In the real world, however, people always have an identity â often even more than one. The transfer of real world transactions to the online world therefore requires identity information. More and more services, especially in e-commerce and collaboration applications, need to identify the user for providing personalized services or for presenting the user to other users. As in real life, a user in an online environment usually plays different roles and interacts with different services hosted by different providers. Current approaches to provide identity information on the Web still force users to provide and update information about their identity for each service independently. Being contradictory to intuitive user expectation, this proves to be a basic barrier for many e-commerce and collaboration applications, it results in coldstart problems for new services and in inconvenience for the user. The availability of identity information for user representation will be important for future Internet-based e-commerce and collaboration applications. Information about the users is needed for performing transactions, for providing personalized services, and for presenting users to each other. Identity management is about managing the information and access to that information. Identities management and central user profile repositories might help to motivate users making user profile information available (because they have control and awareness about who is using it), and to enable services to provide effective personalization without cold-start problems to build social networks (the so called social capital of many business models) Our paper highlights the role of user-centric global identities management for future e-commerce and collaboration applications. It presents a review of the current state of the art in the area of identities management (for Intranets and for the Internet) and discusses needs and possibilities for future developments.    «

The development of the Internet was originally based on the assumption that users remain anonymous. In the real world, however, people always have an identity â often even more than one. The transfer of real world transactions to the online world therefore requires identity information. More and more services, especially in e-commerce and collaboration applications, need to identify the user for providing personalized services or for presenting the user to other users. As in real life, a user in...    »