Liberty Alliance Releases Interface Specifications For Identity-Based Web Services

Customer Inter@ction Solutions, May 2005

Liberty Alliance, a global consortium for open federated identity standards and identity-based Web services, has announced the release of interface specifications that support presence, contact book and geo-location Web services. Deployable on Liberty's Identity Web Services Framework (ID-WSF), these specifications offer new application functionality to enterprises and service providers, as well as privacy, personalization and security benefits to users.

The three service interfaces are designed to function individually or in a seamless, unified fashion. As with ID Personal Profile and ID Employee Profile, previously released service interfaces available with the first version of ID-WSF, each has been created to enhance user control of invoked Web services in a privacy-respecting manner:

* Contact Book Service Interface is a common method for users to manage and share personal or business contacts, regardless of the contact book provider. This enables service providers to access or automatically update, at the user's request, information such as billing or shipping address.

* Geo-Location Service Interface is an interoperable way to automatically identify a person's location at the user's request, thus providing services such as weather, news, travel/currency updates or location directions.

* Presence Service Interface is a common way for users to share presence information - such as whether they are online, offline, on the phone or in a meeting - with any service provider for the purpose of communicating availability.

The three service interface specifications are currently available in draft form at the consortium's Web site.

www.projectliberty.org