Identity Management Systems: Gateway and Guardian for Virtual Residences

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) expand traditional ways of social interaction and thereby feed back on the society that created them. Users have to navigate their enhanced social context and in doing so legitimately strive to apply familiar concepts such as the notion of residence or the intuitive handling of roles. We introduce the concepts of Virtual Residence and Identity Management Systems and elaborate on their interrelation: Firstly, Privacy-Enhancing Identity Management Systems can implement important features of the Virtual Residence. Secondly, the user may benefit from the residence metaphor being employed as an appropriate interface for Identity Management Systems. We find that the proposed Virtual Residence serves to support the context awareness of users and Identity Management Systems, as well as to enforce certain contextbased behaviour. Identity Management Systems, on the other hand, serve to implement rule-based behaviour and can form the underlying and required identitymanaging infrastructure of a Virtual Residence. An outlook completes the paper.