An Ontology-Based Interoperability Solution for Electronic-Identity Systems

Electronic identity (eID) systems enable electronic services and applications to identify users reliably. In an eID system, unique data, i.e. an eID, is assigned to each user. The eID unambiguously identifies the user within the eID system. In most cases, the user's eID is extended by additional attributes such as name, address, or date of birth. The assigned eID and associated attributes are used by electronic services and applications to identify users unambiguously and to obtain required information about these users. In practice, required user attributes potentially need to be exchanged between different eID systems. Unfortunately, each eID system uses its own ontology to represent and organize eIDs and associated attributes. This diversity of ontology definitions prevents an easy exchange of eIDs and attributes between eID systems. To address this issue, we propose an ontology-alignment solution that provides interoperability between eID systems. We show the feasibility of the proposed solution through a Web service (WS) based implementation. This WS enables eID-based applications to retrieve eID attributes from different eID systems. Experiments conducted show that the proposed solution and the resulting WS works with arbitrary ontologies and hence provides interoperability between eID systems.