Concordia

From IIW

What is Concordia?

The Concordia Program is designed as an umbrella initiative to drive harmonization and interoperability of identity specifications and protocols. As expressed by the name (Roman goddess of agreement, understanding, and harmony), the goal of this group is to help drive the development of use-case scenarios where multiple identity specifications, standards and/or other initiatives might co-exist, recognizing heterogeneous deployment environments of the marketplace. Based on this open knowledge gathering process, the group recognizes that additional specifications, profiles and/or services may need to be defined. The group's goals are as follows:

  • Drive development of a ubiquitous, interoperable, privacy-respecting layer for identity in order to:
    • Help drive deployment costs down
    • Assure implementers and deployers of better success and greater productivity
    • Lead to more commercial products and open source offerings, in turn leading to a healthy market
    • Facilitate new service offerings
  • Assure interoperability across this layer
    • Deliver confidence to implementers and deployers in implementing today with successful interoperability tomorrow
  • Encourage strong, cross-sector, cross-geography participation through an open development process

What's happening right now?

The current effort is to identify and document concrete use cases that require multiple identity protocols. All of the currently documented use cases can be found on the wiki, but the current scope includes integrating Cardspace with SAML/Liberty based Service Providers, identity selectors for existing SAML and Liberty protocols leveraging existing service specification like the ID-WSF Interaction Service, WS-Trust integration into existing Liberty ID-WSD service specifications, and SAML integration into the Higgins framework. New use cases are always welcome.

Note that all the past meetings notes and presentations are on the project wiki.

A face-to-face meeting is occurring right before the Internet Identity Workshop on Monday 12/3 from 9am - noon PST. At this meeting use cases will continue to be discussed and plans made for an interop event to occur at the RSA conference in 2008.

What is being planned?

RSA Interop event: The Concordia project is planning an interop event to address some of the use cases defined in previous meetings. The goal is to show multiple identity systems working together to solve real problems

How to contribute?

All meetings are open to anyone who wants to attend. Details of upcoming meetings can be found on the project wiki. Many use cases need resources to drive the solution to implementation so all contributions greatly appreciated.

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