The objective of the project is to advance the state of the art in technologies that provide privacy-enhanced identity and trust management features within complex community-supporting services that are built on Next Generation Networks and delivered by multiple communication service providers. The approach taken by the project is to research, develop, build trial and evaluate an open, privacy-respecting, trust-enabling identity management platform that supports the provision of community services by mobile communication service providers.

Start:

2008-02-01

Completion:

2011-06-30

Vision:

In recent years, we have seen the emergence of services for professional and private on-line collaboration via the Internet. Moreover, communities based on mobile communication allow users to participate in their community not only from places where fixed-line communication is available. Mobile Communities also allow for a more intensive linking of services and therefore integration of people’s virtual and real communities, by using context information, such as location information.

However, when users participate in such communities, they consciously leave private information traces they are unaware of. The providers of community services need to handle trust and privacy in a manner that meets the participants’ needs as well as complying with regulation. Moreover, in order to finance or co-finance respectively such community services, the infrastructure needs to be opened for marketing activities of sponsors/advertisers.

 

A new approach to identity management in community services is needed, in order to meet the needs for:

• the enablement of trust, by members of the community, in other members and in the service-provision infrastructure,
• the privacy of community members’ personal information,
• the control by members of the information they share, and
• the interoperability of community-supporting services between communication service providers.

PICOS will develop and build a state-of-the-art platform for providing the trust, privacy and identity management aspects of community services and applications on the Internet and in mobile communication networks. The PICOS approach to trustworthy on-line community collaboration addresses the following four questions:

• What are the Trust, Privacy and Identity issues in new context-rich mobile communication services, especially community-supporting services?
• How can information flows and privacy requirements be balanced in complex distributed service architectures (e.g., mash-ups)?
• How can these issues be solved in an acceptable, trustworthy, open, scalable, manner?
• Which supporting services and infrastructures do the stakeholders need?

Germany

• Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt a. M.
• IT-Objects GmbH
• Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences 
• Deutsche Telekom AG / T-Mobile

Spain

• Atos Origin Sociedad Anónima Española
• Universidad de Málaga

Great Britain

• Hewlett-Packard Limited Laboratories Bristol

France

• Hewlett-Packard Centre de Competence France

Austria

• CURE - Center for Usability Research & Engineering

Belgium

• Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

Czech Republic

• Masarykova Univerzita, Brno University

• Prof. Dr. Kai Rannenberg
• Dr. Markus Tschersich
• Dr. Christian Kahl
• Dipl.-Wirt.-Inf. Stephan Heim
• Dipl.-Medien-Inf. Katja Böttcher
• Dipl.-Kfm. Tobias Scherner
• Dr. Stefan Weiss