OSIS links Internet identity systems

David Berlind's not the only member of the Between the Lines team at the ID Mashup this week.  I've been here as well, watching the identity happenings.  The first two days were traditional conference style, but the third day of the workshop was done open space style.  That's a great format for generating discussion and this example was no exception.  I went to a session on reputation first thing that resulted in some very good ideas and principles on that important subject.

The second session I attended was a discussion of OSIS, the open source identity selector project. This project has server and client pieces as well as a security token service (STS). The server side pieces of OSIS will be part of the proposed Heraldry project at Apache. The primary purpose of Heraldry is to provide a home for open source identity projects, like OpenID. The client code and STS pieces will be part of the Eclipse Higgins project.

OSIS is more than just a small project to build open source identity selectors for Microsoft's CardSpace (formerly InfoCard); after all, that's been done. OSIS will support interoperability between the addressable identity systems (OpenID, LID, XRI) and card (or token) based identity systems (more notably CardSpace and Higgins). OSIS has the support of all of the major players (including Microsoft, Novell, IBM, SXIP, XRI, and Verisign).

This is really a historic development in the Internet identity space. Microsoft, before their own implementation of CardSpace even ships, is linking up with the larger identity community, including OpenID, LID, i-Names, and Higgins. Make no mistake, they've been participating and giving leadership to that community for a long time, but until now, it wasn't clear that all the various systems would be interoperable. OSIS aims to change that.