SANTA CLARA, Calif. – IBM, Novell and a group of academics working on an open source project designed to tie together applications and identity systems plan to ship the first release of their code next summer.

The Higgins project, which was started in March, is a framework designed to integrate identity, profile, and relationship data from across multiple systems. The framework, which has interface and middleware components, includes both code and an API that developers will use to link their applications into the Higgins identity services. The goal is to support applications whose front-ends are either a browser, rich client or Web services based.

The group made the announcement at the Digital ID World conference.

The Higgins group plans to release a middleware piece called the Identity Attribute Service that acts as a layer on top of identity repositories such as directories or applications. It can aggregate data from multiple sources in real-time and bundle them into a single identity credential. The idea is to link to data without having to move it around the network.

“It is very important for Higgins to enhance privacy,” says Paul Trevithick, CEO of Parity Communications and the project lead on Higgins. “We will segregate information into distinct contexts.”

The Higgins project also plans to produce an open source Security Token Service (STS) based on the WS-Trust protocol. The STS is a lightweight gateway that can run on servers or clients and negotiate the exchange of security tokens. The Higgins project says it will provide a set of basic token brokers that plug into the STS.

Some users say the system appears to act like a virtual directory.

“Most virtual directories talk the [Lightweight Directory Access Protocol], but this potentially has more flexibility to get identity information from systems,” said an IT architect who asked that his name and the name of his company not be used.

In addition to the middleware components, Higgins is developing a user interface component for desktops and devices called I-Card, which shows a list of user-managed digital identity cards that can be used for authentication or other purposes such as tracking relationships with online stores.

The cards will have read/write capabilities so information can be updated using technologies such as Really Simple Syndication.