Intent-Driven Digital Identity Interoperability: Coordinating User Identity and Context Across Distributed Internet Services

The increasing interconnection of digital services has created an Internet environment in which individuals routinely interact with multiple independent identity systems. Users may maintain separate accounts, authentication credentials, authorization relationships, institutional affiliations, and personal profiles across academic platforms, financial institutions, government services, e-commerce platforms, cloud environments, and other digital ecosystems. Although existing identity technologies, including federated identity management, single sign-on, identity federation, and decentralized identifiers, provide mechanisms for authentication and identity exchange, cross-service tasks may still require users to repeatedly establish their identities, provide contextual information, and manage authorization relationships across heterogeneous digital environments. This paper proposes Intent-Driven Digital Identity Interoperability (IDII), a conceptual framework for coordinating user identity and relevant identity contexts across distributed Internet services according to the requirements of an intended task. Rather than treating identity as an isolated authentication attribute associated with an individual application, IDII conceptualizes digital identity as a context-dependent set of identity references, credentials, attributes, relationships, permissions, and verification evidence that can be selectively coordinated across independent services. To operationalize this perspective, the paper introduces the Intent-Driven Identity Interoperability Framework (IDIF), comprising eight interconnected functional components: identity-aware intent interpretation, identity context representation, cross-service identity mapping, identity requirement discovery, contextual identity resolution, federated identity coordination, selective identity and authorization exchange, and identity continuity verification. These components are designed to connect task requirements with appropriate identity resources without assuming that different services must share a common account system or centralized identity database. A central principle of IDII is that identity interoperability should not require unrestricted identity integration. Instead, the framework proposes task-specific identity coordination in which each service receives only the identity information, credentials, and authorization evidence necessary for its particular operation. The framework further distinguishes between identity recognition, identity verification, identity authorization, identity equivalence, and identity context continuity, which are frequently treated as closely related but technically distinct concerns. The paper examines potential advantages concerning reduced identity fragmentation, cross-platform task continuity, selective identity disclosure, reduced authentication friction, institutional interoperability, contextual authorization, and decentralized trust coordination. It also discusses security, privacy, identity correlation, impersonation, revocation, trust management, and governance challenges. Importantly, the proposed advantages are theoretically motivated possibilities rather than experimentally established outcomes. The framework is presented as a conceptual research proposal requiring further formalization, implementation, and empirical evaluation.