A group of academics and major vendors last week kicked off an open source project designed to give applications easier access to identity systems and users more control over their personal information. The Higgins Project will provide a set of adapters that plug into identity systems, such as directories, human resource systems or Web sites using native protocols or APIs.

Higgins-enabled applications and services will make it easier for IT to not only integrate their identity systems but also integrate identity into security architectures. Users will gain more control over how their identity data is disseminated.

Vendors such as project participants IBM and Novell will build adapters, or corporate developers can write their own. IBM and Novell say they are adding Higgins support to their identity software within the next year. Application developers will rely on those adapters as the way to identity-enable applications.

The Higgins Project incorporates principles from the Identity Metasystem model Microsoft laid out last year for an interoperable digital identity architecture that supports multiple underlying technologies, implementations and providers.

Project developers say the system is not a competitor to Microsoft's InfoCard technology, a desktop interface that lets users control the dissemination of their identity data. InfoCard is one identity system that could plug into the Higgins framework, which is based on a Web services model. InfoCard relies on the WS-Trust and WS-* protocols, but it does not work cross-platform.

Paul Trevithick, one of the developers of the Higgins framework, writes on his blog: "We expect that in the next few months a WS-* service will be created for Higgins. Higgins, when configured with this service and running on Linux, MacOS, etc., will fully interoperate with InfoCard running on Windows."

Some experts say the Higgins framework, which is part of the Eclipse development environment, more closely compares with Microsoft's Visual Studio and the tools it makes available to lessen the complexity of integrating applications with back-end identity services.

Developers have tools to lessen the complexity of such tasks as memory management or scheduling, but not identity-based security.