Title: CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK

Conclusion and Future work

This document only represents ‘the tip of the iceberg’, and the first result of the work aiming at better understanding the identity concept and identifying the different terms associated with it. 

Starting from the idea of creating yet another conceptualisation of the identity domain, we rapidly moved away this initial goal and set ourselves some more ambitious objectives. Indeed we wanted to make a more valuable contribution to the conceptualisation of the Identity domain and be able in particular to leverage the value of the Network of excellence in the identity domain that the FIDIS consortium represents. Besides, we also wanted to move away from the illusive objective of producing the perfect, official and complete reference of the terms that are present in the Identity domain (a probably impossible undertaking), in favour of a system less perfect but more able to capture and adapt quickly to the rapid evolution of the Identity concept. Thus, the first objective of this work would not be to produce the ultimate conceptualisation of the identity domain, but rather to produce a tool that would facilitate the circulation and the creation of new ideas related to Identity issues amongst the community of people interested by the subject. 

What were we able to achieve?

The first part of this document is constituted of an approach and a vision defining the concept of collaborative Identity domain definition construction. 

The approach adopted has consisted of adopting a Wiki-based approach for the collaborative collection of terms and definitions. The first version of this Wiki has been implemented, and a first round of data has been entered. Still some issues of dynamics of participations will need to be addressed if we want this WIKI to become sustainable. 

The second part of this document provides a global overview of the Identity field, hopefully comprehensible by the non-expert, and while being very structured and synthetic, providing in some respect an informal categorisation of the field. Two different topics, Identity and Identification, were in particular covered. The content originated when possible from the existing work available from the FIDIS members. 

The last part of this document represents a snapshot of the Wiki content and structure at the time of the writing this document, as well as some alternative categorisations (such as a tentative and partial representation of a user profile) which help to demonstrate the broadness and the complexity of the subject. 

Where are we heading to?

As indicated, this deliverable should only be considered as the start of a continuous process that will help to identify, as they emerge, new Identity terms and concepts, define them (taking into account the different perspectives) and situate them (through the connection with other terms and the illustration with examples and cases), and all this in a collaborative and constructivist setting supported by the FIDIS Wiki of Identity. 

Particular attention will be paid to stimulating the active participation of the maximum number of members in this process of knowledge construction, knowledge use and knowledge exchange. The introduction of different social translucent mechanisms (Thomas, Kellogg and Erickson, 2001), such as visual tag helping to display the activity taking place in the Wiki space, and in particular finding a method (reputation) of rewarding the most active and valuable contributors. 

Other deliverables, such as “Del 2.2 Set of Use Cases and Scenarios”, provides more elaborated examples, cases, stories and scenarios, linking the different identity terms with one another; (2) “Del 2.3 Identity models”, helps to continue this endeavour. 

Besides, the new content will be generated in FIDIS (it has to be reminded that for this first version, little FIDIS content was available) will help in enriching the specification of the conceptualisation of the FIDIS domain. More specifically, the different specialised workpackages such as WP3 Identity Technologies, WP4 Interoperability, WP5 ID-Theft, WP6 Forensic, WP7 Profiling will provide some content from which will be extracted conceptualisation. In some cases these workpackage have even started their own classification that will need to be integrated (examples include “ID fraud inventory” started in WP4 or the Del. 7.2 “Inventory of actual profiling practices and techniques” to name only a few). In the other way round, these different workpackages will have to make use of the global conceptualisation that will have been elaborated. 

Finally, the future direction will consist of consolidating the work by working on a more formal (but not rigid) semantic orientation, and investigating to which extent semantic web approaches and tools can be used for this purpose.