By Andreas M. Antonopoulos, SVP and Founding Partner, Nemertes Research Inc.
March 3, 2006

IBM (NYSE:IBM, http://www.ibm.com), in collaboration with Novell (Nasdaq:NOVL http://www.novell.com) and privately held Parity Communications (http://www.parityinc.net/), announced the launch of project Higgins (http://www.eclipse.org/higgins/). Higgins is an open source framework for
user-centric identity management which highlights the increasing importance of identity management and federated identity.

User-centered identity management puts users in control of their personal information, able to decide how much information they provide to third parties such as banks, doctors and retailers. A user of Higgins may have many different identity contexts – personae – each of which is compartmentalized. The user has an aggregated view of all of these contexts, greatly increasing the user’s control. Banks, doctors and other providers who require identity information can federate with the appropriate user context, while allowing the user to maintain control over the accuracy and dissemination of their identity information.

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