Higgins is built around the concept of information cards, which are simply visual representations of a digital identity. The various components of Higgins are centered around helping end users interact with information cards, as well as enabling developers to support identity cards as a form of authentication in their respective applications.
There are three components provided by Higgins for enabling information-card authentication:
- A GTK/Cocoa selector, which includes a Firefox extension to launch the selection interface when a website requests i-card authentication.
- An Eclipse RCP-based desktop application which supports integration with Internet Explorer 7 to prompt for i-card selection on website request.
- A distributed, embedded Firefox-plugin-based selector -Where-as the first two solutions provide a local registry and selection service for managing information cards, this solution is an early representation of using a remote server to act as a distributed card registry.
- STS IdP - An identity provider solution utilizing WS-Trust.
- SAML2 IdP -An identity provider solution utilizing SAML2
Third, it implements the Higgins Global Graph (HGG) data model and the Higgins Identity Attribute Service (IdAS). Developers now have a framework that provides an interoperability and portability abstraction layer over existing “silos” of identity data. For the first time, IdAS makes it possible to “mash-up” identity and social network data across highly heterogeneous data sources including directories, relational databases, and social networks.
The HGG/IdAS layer of Higgins offers integration opportunities between several identification protocols such as OpenID, WS-Trust, SAML, and LDAP.Higgins has received industry support from several companies that provide identity-management solutions including: IBM, Microsoft, and Novell.
Microsoft authored a similar technology to Higgins information cards with Windows CardSpace (initially released in 2006); Higgins identity selector solutions are compatible with CardSpace-enabled applications.
At the Eclipse project page, more information is available regarding Higgins identity solutions, and downloads are available for Higgins 1.0 solutions and components.
Community comments
Higgins
by Danny Fame,
Higgins
by Danny Fame,
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Openid have great support from google. Higgins is another great ID management solution which need greater support from our internet giant search engine. Hopefully higgins will be widely used.
Danny - meteko