D2.13 Virtual Persons CONCLUSION

Conclusion

This intuitive introduction of the model based on virtual persons motivates the introduction of two layers to describe more faithfully the reality of new forms of identities induced by new technologies in the Information Society, in relation with rights, duties, obligations and responsibilities. 

The model takes also into consideration the corresponding privacy issues. 

The first layer – the physical world – is the collection of all physical entities. Physical persons belong to this world. The second layer – the virtual world – is an abstract layer. It creates an indirection between acting subjects of the physical world and the identifying information related to their actions and/or the objects supporting these actions.

This abstract layer allows a unified description of many identity-related concepts that are usually defined separately without taking into consideration their similarities: avatars, pseudonyms, categories, profiles, legal persons, etc. This unified description is based on a generalization of the traditional concepts of virtual persons.

Section is a lexicon of the main definitions. It is recommended to use it as a dictionary and to skip it when first reading the formal description of the model. Most of the information in the lexicon also appears in the main text with extra explanations.