Using Biometrics as an Enabling Technology in Balancing Universality and Selectivity for Management of Information Access

The key concept of Universal Access in the Information Society has important and far-reaching implications for the design of a wide range of systems and data sources. This paper sets out to examine two fundamentally conflicting aspects of the broad principle of universality in design, pointing to the opposite requirement that, in many applications, access to a system or set of data must be limited to an identifiable population of "authorised" users. However, the idea of universality then applies at a lower level, since the mechanisms used to impose these limitations should themselves not be dependent on the physical attributes or expertise of individuals, but rather related to their identity and designated level of authorisation. This leads to an interesting situation where the concept of universality must be implemented at different levels and, equally, must be balanced against the competing claims of the constraints imposed by authorisation-determined selectivity. This paper argues that technology based on biometric processing - the exploitation of measurements relating to individual physiological or behavioural attributes - provides a key platform on which an access management structure can be realised. Experimental results based on various biometric modalities are used to support and illustrate the ideas proposed.