The Liberty Alliance will this week unveil a federated
identity management system to allow individuals to manage their
personal lives securely on the web.
The Liberty ID-WSF People Service is a key component in the
alliance’s ID-WSF 2.0 federated identity management
specification.
Federated identity management allows internet users to use a
single sign-on procedure to access and share information across
different websites and corporate intranets.
Liberty says People Service is the industry's first
comprehensive platform for managing social information within an
open federated network environment.
Other federated identity management systems are proprietary
rather than open, such as Microsoft’s Passport log-in system, which
is used on Microsoft’s websites and a few third-party websites,
including eBay.
People Service allows consumers and enterprise users to manage
social applications such as bookmarks, blogs, calendars, photo
sharing and instant messaging using the ID-WSF 2.0 framework.
People Service has been developed to allow individuals to easily
store, maintain and categorise on-line relationships. Consumers and
enterprise users can centrally manage all of their information
using privacy controls built into the system based on a Liberty web
services platform.