User Representation in eCommerce and Collaboration Applications

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 and interests for each service independently. That results in cold-start problems for new services and in inconvenience for the user. In this paper we argue that user-centric global identity management is needed for future e-commerce and collaboration applications. We present the current state of art in the area of identity management, discuss needs and possibilities for future developments, and show some results of the work we have done in this context.