The average gestation period for a human baby is nine months. The average gestation period for an elephant is just a tad under two years. But that's almost instantaneous when compared to a software project. Still, after being talked about, chewed over and discussed for much longer than an elephant's gestation period, the Eclipse Foundation has finally released Higgins framework, Version 1.0, an open source identity framework.

I first came across Higgins at the initial meeting of the Internet Identity Workshop in November 2005 when Mary Ruddy and Paul Trevithick, the co-founders of SocialPhysics.org, talked about their idea for the Higgins Trust Framework – an “Identity Framework.” This would be a part of the “Social Web,” which they explained as a “layer built on top of the Internet to provide a trusted way to link people, organizations, and concepts. It will provide people more control over their digital identities, the ability to more easily find other people and groups, and more control over how they are seen by others across diverse contexts.”

It seemed like a nice idea to me, but nothing momentous. IBM and Novell, though, felt differently and soon injected a good bit of money into the open source project (see "The real deal about IBM, Novell and Project Higgins" ).

Some of us (OK, me) had the impression that there was already a release of the framework. But, no, I was wrong. Until now.

Higgins isn’t another protocol but a framework for connecting, integrating and using existing protocols – such as the WS-* protocols of the Web services initiative, SAML and other Liberty Alliance protocols, LDAP and other directory protocols and much more.

In the long run, though, the major importance of the Higgins framework may lie in what’s called the Higgins Global Graph (HGG) data model and the Higgins Identity Attribute Service (IdAS). Developers now have a framework that provides an interoperability and portability abstraction layer over existing silos of identity data. For the first time, IdAS makes it possible to "mash-up" identity and social network data across heterogeneous data sources including directories, relational databases, and social networks. Technology built on this framework could allow users to login to their bank account with a secure authorization key, which would be automatically generated anew for each visit. Users wouldn't need to remember or write down passwords, which can also be long and complex enough to be secure. Additionally, this same interface also could allow users to sign into their favorite wiki or blog with just one click.

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