The Liberty Alliance on Tuesday released additional details outlining its commitment to open standards for the organization’s Federated Network Identity Architecture and the second phase of its Web services specification.
The complete Federated Network Identity Architecture will provide open, standards-based foundation for building and supporting identity-based Web services. The architecture enables companies to increase the security of their information systems, lower infrastructure costs and adapt to new business models, the Alliance said.
Phase 2 of the Web services specification (version 1.0 was released last July) is expected to be released by the middle of 2003. The Alliance said it will enhance the Liberty Identity Federated Framework and introduce the Alliance’s Identity Web Services Framework (ID-WSF). The Web services framework outlines the technical components needed to build interoperability for identity-based Web services.
Phase 2 will also introduce the Identity Services Interface Specification (ID-SIS), a collection of specifications built on the Web services framework. The Alliance said these specifications would provide a standard way for companies to build interoperable services such as registration, profiles, contact books or alert services.
The Liberty Alliance is a group of vendors and end user organizations that is attempting to create specifications for single sign-on for both e-commerce and Web services. The architecture is intended to allow companies to increase the security of their information systems, lower infrastructure costs and adapt to business models.
The architecture and features of the current and upcoming Liberty specifications are detailed in a white paper called the Introduction to the Liberty Alliance Identity Architecture, is available online at www.projectliberty.org.