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FIDIS 

Future of Identity in the Information Society (No. 507512)

 

D2.3 

  

[Final], Version: 2.0 

File: fidis-wp2-del2.3.models.doc 

Page 14 

 

example is the profiles generated by public bodies e.g. in the case of criminal investigations. 

The employees doing the review are mandated by the organisation and specially educated to 

do profiling. The techniques and parameters used for the profiling are in most cases (public or 

trade) secrets – the profiled persons get, in most cases, no feedback as to how the profiling 

was done and what resulted from the profiles. Looking at the results of profiling based on 

authentic personal information, but in central aspects not being influenced by the profiled 

person itself, we can speak of a “derived identity”. Profiling is done on both members and 

clients of the organisations (for more details please refer to deliverable 7.2). 

 

Type 3 IMS: individual function 

Type 3 IMS are used in both interactional as well as in organisational systems although 

organisational aspects are dominating. We suggest examining internet-typical 

communications like chat, blogging and avatars for their interactional character. In this 

context the new description of borderlines between interactional and organisational systems 

might be necessary. To use those services with interactional aspects we find requirements 

such as written communication, membership and the use of services of telecommunication 

providers which are typical for organisational systems. 

  

Another example of the use of type 3 IMS within organisational systems is the use of different 

web services with different accounts by a customer (client role outside of the organisation). In 

this example type 3 IMS are the decentralised, user driven view on account management 

systems (type 1 IMS) for public web based services. 

 

Due to the existence of alternate services and the user control of which one to use with which 

account, we can speak of “chosen identity”. 

 

2.2  Modelling the Person in Information Systems 

 

IMS, or systems that integrate an IMS component, use a variety of attributes to represent 

(model) a person and to later manage this person’s information. For instance attributes can be 

used to represent the identifiers of a person (such as name or pseudonym), her biological 

characteristics (gender, hair colour), her location (permanent address or geo-location at a 

given time), competences (diploma, skills), social characteristics (affiliation to groups, 

friends), and even behaviours (personality or mood). 

In some cases, standards and specifications have even been elaborated to facilitate the design 

and the interoperability of such systems. For instance LDAP schemas have been defined to 

specify how to represent person’s information in directories. In the human resources domain, 

the HR-XML specification has been elaborated to standardise the way information about 

employees are represented in the management software (see the Annex for an overview of 

different standards and specification for people representation). 

Actually, an important strand of research has been conducted for many years in user 

modelling, aiming at enhancing the interaction between users and systems via the design of 

adaptive systems (Fischer, 2001; Brusilovsky, 2001; Stephanidis, 2001; Kay, 2000; Andre et 

al., 2000; Fink and Kobsa, 2000, etc.). The goal of research on personalisation is to improve 

the efficiency and effectiveness of user interaction by taking into account the specificity of the 

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FIDIS 

Future of Identity in the Information Society (No. 507512)

 

D2.3 

  

[Final], Version: 2.0 

File: fidis-wp2-del2.3.models.doc 

Page 15 

 

end-user (such as his cognitive style, or his competence) as well as the context of activity of 

this user (for instance the current tasks in which he is engaged or the organisational context 

(Nabeth, Angehrn, and Balakrishnan, 2004)). Practically, adaptive systems are able to support 

the user better by filtering the irrelevant information (reducing cognitive load), by delivering 

this information at the right time, by choosing a form of delivery that maximises its impact on 

this user, or by proposing very contextualised help. Research on adaptive systems has been 

conducted for applications in a number of domains such as e-learning Diogene (2002), e-

commerce (Kobsa et al., 2000) or knowledge management (Razmerita, 2004). 

 

In this document, we will not enter into the details of these theories or standards (which 

would be out of the scope of this document) but just make a tentative attempt to find some 

way to categorise these attributes.  

In particular, we are going to present categorisations according to a 

•

 

temporal perspective 

•

 

functional perspective 

•

 

domain perspective 

 

2.2.1 Temporal categorisation 

The different attributes can be first categorised by the level of permanence of the information 

they represent: 

•

 

permanent – given 

•

 

permanent – acquired 

•

 

persistent situations 

•

 

temporal state 

 

Permanent – given: Some attributes are used to represent some permanent (given) 

characteristics that were given to a person and on which he usually has no influence. 

Examples include for instance the biological characteristics (gender, eye colour, fingerprint, 

etc.), some socio-cultural-economical characteristics (parents, country of birth, etc.), basic 

personality traits (for some psychologists such as Hans J. Eysenck, personality has an 

important genetic basis), etc. Some exceptions such as gender changing have to be made 

regarding the person’s non-influence. 

Permanent – acquired: Some other attributes are used to represent permanent (acquired) 

characteristics that the person was able to acquire because of some circumstances or because 

of a deliberate action. Examples include qualification (either because of a deliberate action 

like graduating at a University or because of circumstances like learning a new foreign 

language during the stay in a country), behavioural characteristics. 

Persistent situations (or states): Other attributes are used to represent a situation that is not 

permanent, but that has some persistence (for instance several years). Examples include the 

address of a person, a job position (title, employer, etc.), marital status, social status, or a 

network of friends. 

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