Distributed Identity Management Model for Digital Ecosystems

Digital ecosystems is the new paradigm for dynamic IT business integration. A digital ecosystem consists of institutions that compete, collaborate, and form stable or unstable federations. Such a dynamic environment becomes a bottleneck for identity management solutions. Existing solutions are either too restricting and not flexible enough to support the dynamic nature of ecosystems or they are too complex and difficult to adopt by small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs). This paper presents an identity management model for automated processing of identity information between distributed ecosystem partners. The model emphasizes on its practical, clear and easy to deploy framework. The model is based on the new OASIS SAML standard to provide interoperability and convergence between existing identity technologies. The paper presents the basic and extended identity models for single services and service compositions. The aim of this research is to allow SMEs to use and enhance their current identity technology with a practical and easy to implement identity management solution that scales up to the dynamic and distributed nature of digital ecosystems.