It’s a Wrap: Liberty Finalizes Web Services Schema

The road was long, but the journey could be worth it for the Internet
community and the businesses that seek to make money from it.

The Liberty Alliance, whose members include service providers like AOL
 and American Express, today released the final version
of the Identity Web Services Framework 2.0.

ID-WSF 2.0 is a schema for building secure, interoperable Web services
 that can be piped over the Internet.

ID-WSF 2.0 was originally developed to transmit secure transactions between large businesses, such as financial firms that need to process secure online
financial transactions as part of a service-oriented architecture (SOA)
 for distributed computing.

The schema now takes social-networking sites into consideration.

The new framework includes Liberty People Service, a Web services framework
the group created to let consumers and organizations securely store
information for blogging, photo sharing and instant messaging in a social
network.

Users establish privacy controls, enabling them to guard against
phishing, pharming and other forms of online identity theft that have
plagued the Web in the past few years.

Such controls are crucial at a time when social-networking sites like
MySpace.com, Flickr and others in the so-called Web 2.0 world are accruing
more users at a rapid rate; businesses need to employ a trustworthy
framework to safeguard the information users store on their sites.

ID-WSF 2.0 is now one such option.

The final version of ID-WSF 2.0 also allows SAML 2.0 assertions to be used
as security tokens, and it incorporates WS-Addressing to enable asynchronous
messaging capabilities.

There are also new subscription and notification
features to allow a push model for attribute sharing.

To give the public a window into the machinations behind the development of
ID-WF 2.0, the Liberty Alliance also published use cases and market
requirements here.

Liberty will hold the first testing event to show ID-WSF 2.0 interoperability in France during the week of
December 4.

HP , Sun Microsystems , Novell  and Nokia  are among the companies
that have passed testing for Liberty Web Services interoperability.