Virtuality and digital technologies have added innumerable nuances to the nature of our identity. European researchers are working hard to keep pace with the new identity paradigm.

What is identity? In the digital age, this has become one of the big questions. The multiplication of online personas, the numerous and increasing contexts where identity plays a role, and the perennial problem of establishing reliable, secure identity in cyberspace make this one of the bigger challenges that the information society faces.

FIDIS, or the Future of Identity in the Information Society, is a network of excellence (NoE) set up to prepare Europe for the many emerging identity issues.

“As usual with research, particularly in a multidisciplinary project like FIDIS, we started out by defining our terms and looking at the nature of identity,” explains André Deuker of the Goethe University Frankfurt and a researcher at the FIDIS project. “What is the identity of identity?”

“We concluded that it is not one, single concept, but rather it is a host of pieces of information about an individual. So we came up with the concept of partial identities, where you might exchange your credit card information, for example, but wouldn’t reveal your eye colour, or social security number.”

So in the FIDIS network of excellence, identity are all those pieces of information that define a particular individual, from their DNA to how they like to take their coffee. Depending on the context, people will decide to reveal some information, but not all.

Such general statements provide the essential framework to approach a sprawling issue like identity, and are particularly useful for networks like FIDIS.

NoEs exist to create world-class expertise in a given scientific field by linking all the industry and academic players that contribute to a particular domain. Scientists, engineers, theoreticians, psychologists, legal experts and other social sciences can meet and get to know one another around a series of important problems in a particular field.

In this way, researchers in different areas, but working on the same problem, can learn about issues facing other disciplines. They make contacts and can help each other. The upshot is a much stronger research resource for Europe, and much greater standing across the world.

The future of identity in the information society is one of those big problems that can benefit enormously from this type of concerted effort. It is a complex and diverse problem, touching every area of life. It requires cooperation between many scientific, social and economic fields.