Semantic Integration of Identity Data Repositories

With the continuously growing number of distributed and heterogeneous IT systems there is the need for structured and efficient identity management (IdM) processes. This implies that new users are created once and then the information is distributed to all applicable software systems same as if changes on existing user objects occur. The central issue is that there is no generally ac-cepted standard for handling this information distribution because each system has its own internal representation of this data. Our approach is to give a se-mantic definition of the digital user objects’ attributes to ease the mapping process of an abstract user object to the concrete instantiation of each software system. Therefore we created an ontology to define the mapping of users’ at-tributes as well as an architecture which enables the semantic integration of identity data repositories. Our solution has been tested in an implementation case study.