D2.2: Set of use cases and scenarios

Title: IDENTITY IN THE AMBIENT INTELLIGENCE ENVIRONMENT

Identity in the Ambient Intelligence Environment

Identity Information

We can split the identity information into three types: 

1. Offline Identity Information 

2. Digital Identity Information 

3. Identity Information to bridge offline and digital Identities 

The offline Identity information can be 1) related to the appearance such as hair, eyes colour, glasses, etc. 2) used as social information, e.g. name, postal address, phone number and 3) represented by identity tokens (passport, visa, credit card, security social number, Bank Account Number or BAN). 

The digital identity can be described in the same way. So the information related to the appearance can be incorporated into, for instance a biometric template (fingerprint template, iris template). The corresponding social information can be a nickname, an e-mail address or an IP address. And the digital signature or more generally any digital certificates can be considered as identity tokens for the digital identity. 

For describing Identity information to bridge offline and digital Identities, we can distinguish the information related to the knowledge-based Identification (password, PIN) and the information gathered from the user context (profile, user preferences). 

Identity Information concerns

In the framework of AmI space, four concerns related to the identity information can be underlined: 

1. Interoperability 

2. Privacy 

3. Data Protection 

4. Storage 

Thus, the Identity information should be understandable by any device (interoperability) and should be used only by authorized devices (privacy). More importantly, the user should be able to control and/or specify which information to disclose and to whom.

The AmI environment should provide efficient and reliable mechanisms to ensure data protection (transfer, storage) in order to increase trust and confidence in the information society. The storage concern is related to the choice to use centralized database or not. This choice involves different measures to be taken concerning not only the protection of data and but also the security in general (e.g., access rights, etc.) and identity management (e.g., identity synchronisation, identity revocation, etc.).