Bi-directional Identity Linking for Virtual Worlds and Collaboration
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Solution Overview
Problem
Virtual worlds and social collaboration platforms lack integration for identity management and notification/content exchange, preventing seamless interaction and communication between users across these platforms, leading to missed notifications and inability to share information or establish relationships.
Innovation Solution
A bi-directional linking system using a central identity management system that associates virtual world user identifiers with social collaboration platform identifiers, enabling the determination of associations between contacts and updating information sets to facilitate communication and notification across platforms.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If virtual worlds and social collaboration platforms operate independently with separate identity management systems, then each platform maintains its own operational independence and security, but users cannot bi-directionally interact between platforms and notifications cannot be exchanged
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a federation service as an intermediary component that mediates between the virtual world platform and social collaboration platform. This service maintains identifier mappings and enables bidirectional communication without requiring direct integration between the two platforms, thus resolving the contradiction by adding adaptability while managing complexity through a dedicated intermediary layer
2Reliability
If a central identity management system links virtual world identifiers with social collaboration platform identifiers, then users can communicate and share information across platforms, but the system requires maintaining and synchronizing multiple identifier mappings
Solution Approach 1:
The federation service implements self-service mechanisms where identifier mappings are automatically created and maintained through user actions within the virtual world environment. The system automatically detects when a user adds a contact and creates the corresponding identifier mapping without requiring manual administrative intervention, thus improving reliability while reducing the operational complexity of managing identifier mappings
3Productivity
If the system determines associations between social collaboration contacts and virtual world contacts, then users receive notifications about online contacts and can share content, but the system must continuously monitor and update contact relationships
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary actions by pre-establishing identifier mappings and contact associations when users first add contacts in the virtual world. This advance preparation enables immediate notification delivery when contacts go online without requiring real-time analysis of contact relationships, thus improving productivity while minimizing the ongoing time investment needed for maintaining associations
Data Source
AI summary
A method, information processing system, and computer program storage product link information associated with a virtual world with information associated with a social collaboration platform. A virtual world user identifier and a social collaboration platform user identifier are stored. The virtual world identifier is associated with a set of virtual world contacts for the respective user. The social collaboration platform user identifier is associated with a set of social collaboration contacts for the user. The virtual world user identifier is linked to the social collaboration platform user identifier. An association is determined between at least one of the set of social collaboration contacts and the virtual world identifier set of virtual world contacts and the social collaboration platform user identifier, respectively, for the respective user. An information set associated with at least one of the virtual world user identifier and the social collaboration identifier is updated to include the association.