The Pervasiveness of Digital Identity: Surveying Themes, Trends, and Ontological Foundations

Journal article : Review

Digital identity operates as the connective infrastructure of the digital age, linking individuals, organisations, and devices into networks through which services, rights, and responsibilities are transacted. Despite this centrality, the field remains fragmented, with technical solutions, disciplinary perspectives, and regulatory approaches often developing in parallel without interoperability. This paper presents a systematic survey of digital identity research, drawing on a Scopus-indexed baseline corpus of 2551 publications spanning full years 2005–2024, complemented by a recent stratum of 1241 publications (2023–2025) used to surface contemporary thematic structure and inform the ontology-oriented synthesis. The survey contributes in three ways. First, it provides an integrated overview of the digital identity landscape, tracing influential and widely cited works, historical developments, and recent scholarship across technical, legal, organisational, and cultural domains. Second, it applies natural language processing and subject metadata to identify thematic patterns, disciplinary emphases, and influential authors, exposing trends and cross-field connections difficult to capture through manual review. Third, it consolidates recurring concepts and relationships into ontological fragments (illustrative concept maps and subgraphs) that surface candidate entities, processes, and contexts as signals for future formalisation and alignment of fragmented approaches. By clarifying how digital identity has been conceptualised and where gaps remain, the study provides a foundation for progress toward a universal digital identity that is coherent, interoperable, and socially inclusive.

Authors: Comb, M; Martin, A

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: MDPI
• Journal: Information
• Volume: 17
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 85
• Article number: 85
• Publication date: 2026-01-13
• Acceptance date: 2026-01-09
• DOI: 10.3390/info17010085
• EISSN: 2078-2489
• ISSN: 2078-2489
• Language: English
• Keywords: governance; digital identity; natural language processing; trust; security; identity management; privacy; interoperability; ontology; socio-technical systems
• Subtype: Review