Call for Participation: OASIS OASIS Identity Metasystem Interoperability (IMI) TC
One of the latest calls for participation that came my way was this one for Identity Metasystem Interoperability. I’ll fess up now and say this has been sitting in my inbox for a while waiting for me to have a look through it hence this entry not being quite as current as it could be.
Firstly, what is an identity metasystem? A good definition can be found (as always) at Wikipedia. In brief, an identity metasystem provides for a user to be able to manage their identity credentials all in one place. So, if I’m a researcher and I have a digital certificate, a federation login and access to a wiki or blog through a user name and password, I can manage them off one interface instead of having to remember each set of details.
So what does this mean? Well, we at JISC put out an ITT for some work looking at exactly the same area and its applicability to higher and further education last year. We felt at the time that there was a great deal that could be got out of finding appropriate identity metasystems to manage identity for those in education and research as we’re all conscious of the ever-increasing number of identity credentials we get given. We didn’t get any responses we could fund so it was put on hold until there was more capacity in the sector to respond.
OASIS’s move to form the group is worth a look because it’s showing a wider interest in getting this working after quite a lot of effort from Microsoft to promote CardSpace and infocards. There is also the work of the Higgins project and Bandit’s DigitalMe and previous efforts such as at a Burton identity event to show interoperability between all these systems. Is now the time when identity metasystems will start being used rather than just being shipped with one of the most-used operating systems? I think time will tell and that users are taking quite a while to get used to this new thing called identity. In the mean time, I hope that the TC on identity metasystems is a diverse one that reflects the needs not only of Microsoft but also of a wide range of users, including those in education and research.
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