Provider-Independent social identity management for personal and professional applications

Over the last years, social networking sites have matured while gaining major importance both in personal and professional settings. This work was motivated by two observations. Firstly, sites such as Facebook are used for diverse purposes and to reach contacts from various areas of life. At the same time, data submitted to these sites is increasing in volume and sensitivity. This prompts adapting one's online appearance and conduct depending on the current context, which is referred to as social identity management. While some social network sites offer means to manage the visibility of personal attributes within the site, it has become necessary to embrace a global perspective on the user's identity management on the social web, hence making it provider-independent. This is due to the second observation: Nowadays, instead of one, a multitude of social networking sites is used due to their diversity in features, topics of interest and differing user bases. Beyond, more than one service should be used to avoid the disadvantages of being dependent on a single provider. Unfortunately, the simultaneous use of multiple services of the social web leads to the redundant representations of one's identity data and contacts, thereby possibly leading to inconsistent social identity management. To tackle these issues, this dissertation thesis proposes a solution that allows conducting social identity management in a consistent and provider-independent manner. To facilitate this, requirements to such a solution are analyzed from a user perspective. Subsequently, user identity models are built based on common and proposed concepts and notions found in social networking sites. Based on this, the proposed solution is presented both in broad and refined levels of detail. It is evaluated by analyzing the fulfillment of necessary preconditions by current social networking sites and through a prototypical implementation.