I’m looking forward to participating in the new OASIS Identity Metasystem Interoperability Technical Committee (IMI TC) starting next week, which will produce an Information Card standard. As I told John Fontana of Network World earlier this week after the OASIS announcement of the IMI TC, this work is coming at a logical time.
The industry has been working together on building and testing interoperable Information Card software for the past two years through the OSIS Interops. The breadth of participation and the level of interop achieved between the participants are a testament to the maturity both of the Identity Selector Interoperability Profile specification, which will be a primary input to the standardization work, and of the numerous implementations of interoperable Information Card software. I’m also pleased that the features and tests from the most recent OSIS Interop will be one of the inputs informing the standardization work, enabling the committee to benefit from the experiences that implementers have gained by seeing how their software actually interoperates with others’ solutions.
As a personal note, I haven’t been involved in standards work since I was a technical editor of the POSIX Threads standard in the late ’80s and early ’90s (eventually published as PASC 1003.1c-1995 and ISO/IEC 9945-1:1996). I’ll be curious to see how the OASIS process is like and unlike the POSIX process from nearly two decades ago. Also on a personal level, I’ll say that the committee is a great collection of individuals, and I’m really looking forward to working with them to produce an identity standard of significant long-term value.
Also, be sure to see the comprehensive posting on Cover Pages about the IMI TC, which is chock full of useful information and references. Looking forward to seeing some of you in London!
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