Providing an adapted and personalized service is not limited to just only taking into account users' preferences. With the convergence of different network infrastructures, systems and terminals, this problem encompasses network profiles, terminal profiles, and of course smartcard profiles. These include hardware and software profiles and finally users' profiles, which can be partly carried-on within the smartcard. Providing a service matching the devices capalities and users' preferences at each connection, is one of the today's challenge on network convergence (figure 7).
Figure 7 - Adaption of Services
PNDS-based smartcard is an interesting concept for profiling aspects. It proposes a flexible structure based on a naming and directory service for applications and systems on the terminal. PNDS allows the integration of user profiles in an anonymous terminal, and personalizes the terminal and its applications with both information stored inside the card and references to personal data on the network.
PNDS is a generic component that is able to store any kind of objects, and referrals to objects accessible on the network are implemented both to get an infinite data memory capacity and to share data between several people.
Furthermore, PNDS has been integrated in a global framework and architecture based on a unified application programming interface (API). This means that client applications invoke PNDS as any other servers, without being aware of PNDS smartcard specific commands.
In this prototype, access control has been limited to PIN code authentication. Next step would be to refine the security, and define a security model for accessing and modifying PNDS local and remote objects.