Community support and identity management

Computer based community support systems can provide powerful support in direct exchange of information and in finding people for information exchange. Such applications usually make use of information about the user (user profile information) for personalization and for supporting contact management. As in real life, a user will interact with different communities (community support applications) hosted by different providers. With the current approach users have to provide and update information about their identity and interests for each community independently. That results in cold-start problems with new community support applications and in inconvenience for the user. In this paper we discuss user-centric identity management for community support applications and concentrate on a platform for using user profiles in more than one application. We also propose mechanisms to address privacy issues in this framework.