Liberty Alliance, a global consortium for open federated identity standards and identity-based Web services, released interface specifications that support presence, contact book and geo-location Web services. Deployable on Liberty’s Identity Web Services Framework (ID-WSF), these specifications offer new application functionality to enterprises and service providers, as well as privacy, personalization and security benefits to users.
- Contact Book Service Interface: A common method for users to manage and share personal or business contacts regardless of contact book provider, enabling service providers to access or automatically update, at the user’s request, information like billing or shipping address.
- Geo-location Service Interface: An interoperable way to automatically identify a person’s location, at the user’s request, to provide services like weather, news, travel or currency updates or directions to a chosen location.
- Presence Service Interface: A common way for users to share presence information, such as whether they are online, offline, on the phone or in a meeting, with any service provider for the purpose of communicating availability.
The three service interfaces are designed to function individually or in a seamless unified fashion. As with ID Personal Profile and ID Employee Profile, previously released service interfaces available with the first version of ID- WSF, each has been created to enhance user control of invoked Web services, in a privacy-respecting manner. Each has been created to enhance user control of invoked Web services, in a privacy-respecting manner.
The three service interface specifications are currently available in draft form. http://www.projectliberty.org/