Benefits

For end users

Higgins Selectors are user-centric apps for creating, selecting, sharing and managing the various i-cards that represent your identity in different contexts and relationships. These selectors are available to support specific combinations of OSX, Linux and Windows operating systems as well as Firefox and IE browsers.

For developers

Higgins includes code for selectors for a number of platforms as well as Java code for two identity provider (IdP) web services. The first is a Security Token Service (STS) that supports WS-Trust. The second is for an IdP that supports SAML2.

Higgins also includes “relying party” libraries necessary to enable websites and systems to request and accept i-cards. Developers can incorporate this relying party code into their applications and web sites to make it easier for users to login.

Underneath the selectors and web services just mentioned lies an identity management abstraction layer. This layer consists of a software framework that can be extended using plugins. The lowest layer of this framework is the Identity Attribute Service (IdAS) that provides an interoperability and portability across “silos” of identity data. IdAS provides read/write access to a wide variety of data sources including LDAP directories and can be extended using plugins called “Context Providers”. The IdAS service maps identity and social network data into the Higgins Context Data Model. IdAS makes it possible to mash up identity and social network data across highly heterogeneous data sources including directories, relational databases, and social networks.