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User Profile Management (UPM) is an essential feature to support applications in Next-Generation Network (NGN). Its actual realization depends on standardization of information and preferences and the ways in which user data are expressed and handled. To this end, an NGN may support different approaches; among them, the ’federated approach’ seems particularly relevant, as it fits the very common scenario in which many existing services and devices already contain specific settings and preferences that are however unrelated to any other. This paper proposes a novel, totally distributed solution for data federation, where authorization, management of data localization and synchronization of federated data are thought to be part of the meta information that may be associated with each data element, rather than being external resources or built-in functions, as in legacy solutions. First, the present paper introduces the work on personalization and UPM and the NGN architecture being done at ETSI. Then, the paper illustrates the work on user data interoperability performed at OASIS XDI TC. Finally, based on these inputs, it explains how to combine them into a novel solution (which is not part of ETSI or OASIS specifications). Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.