The development of the Internet was originally based on the assumption that a user remains anonymous. However, more and more services need to know the user for providing personalized services or for presenting the user to other users. As in real life, a user will interact with different services hosted by different providers. With the current approach users have to provide and update information about their identity for each service independently. That results in cold-start problems for new services and inconvenience for the user. In this paper we argue that user-centric global identities management is needed for future e-commerce and collaboration applications. We review the current state of art in the area of identities management, discuss needs and possibilities for future developments, and present some results of our ongoing research.    «

The development of the Internet was originally based on the assumption that a user remains anonymous. However, more and more services need to know the user for providing personalized services or for presenting the user to other users. As in real life, a user will interact with different services hosted by different providers. With the current approach users have to provide and update information about their identity for each service independently. That results in cold-start problems for new serv...    »