A key driving factor for biometrics is the widespread national and international depl- ment of biometric systems that has been initiated in the past two years and is about to accelerate. While nearly all current biometric deployments are government-led and pr- cipally concerned with national security and border control scenarios, it is now apparent that the widespread availability of biometrics in everyday life will also spin out an ev- increasing number of (private) applications in other domains. Crucial to this vision is the management of the user’s identity, which does not only imply the creation and update of a biometric template, but requires the development of instruments to properly handle all the data and operations related to the user identity. COST Action 2101 on Biometrics for Identity Documents and Smart Cards has - erated as a valuable and effective platform for close collaboration of European sci- tists from academia and industry researching biometrics for identity documents and smartcards. This has led to the continuous advances achieved in various classes of biometrics and their implementations in the identity management domain. These c- tributions to knowledge in this field were first presented at the First European Wo- shop on Biometrics and Identity Management (BioID 2008) organized in Roskilde, Denmark during May 7–9, 2008.
