Re: Higgins

Hey Adrian,

I was one of the main contributors on Higgins for several years.
It was definitely similar to this group's work, since it was also about
gathering and then sharing credentials.
Credentials in Higgins were modeled as "cards", and there were
"self-issued" and "managed" cards.
Cards could be obtained and submitted to websites using client-side
"selector" software (browser plugins).
Those cards and credentials were limited to a key/value structure and
could not contain arbitrary RDF data.

On the surface, Higgins was basically an open-source alternative to
Microsoft CardSpace and its InfoCards.

But its real innovation was the underlying data model that you just
pointed to, based on RDF and OWL.
We had the concept of an abstract global graph of data, with data coming
from various different local and remote sources ("contexts").
We had a collection of "context providers", i.e. libraries that could
access and map the various data sources, e.g. LDAP, Facebook, etc.
We also had a way to point at specific properties of specific resources
in a specific context with just a single identifier.
So e.g. to point to the e-mail attribute of my Facebook account, I would
only need a single global ID string, rather than a URI for my resource
and then a URI for a property, and maybe another URI for a named graph.

And so on, there were more cool ideas, such as an early form of access
control for RDF graphs.
There were some high-profile PoCs, e.g. companies like Equifax issuing
cards with Higgins software.
Novell, IBM, Google, etc. were involved, we also worked with Idemix and
U-Prove, SAML2, OpenID, etc. early on.

You ask why didn't it go any further. Not sure. The main company
(Parity, later Azigo) ran out of money.
And users simply didn't want to install and use the card selector
software, I guess that's the reason.

Here is a presentation I gave about Higgins in 2008 if you're interested!
http://www.slideshare.net/peacekeeper/higgins-ese-presentation

all the best,
Markus

Am 6/4/2015 um 11:25 AM schrieb Adrian Hope-Bailie:
> I wonder if anyone knows anything about the Higgins project:
> http://www.eclipse.org/higgins/
>
> It seems to have faded to nill many years ago despite having some
> promise and some high profile organisations as participants.
>
> I found their data model particularly interesting:
> http://wiki.eclipse.org/Persona_Data_Model_2.0
>
> Adrian

Received on Friday, 12 June 2015 22:13:31 UTC