The Liberty Alliance, an industry consortium working for open standards in federated network identity, has released three new interface specifications for identity-based Web services. The new specifications support Presence, Geo-locations and Contact Book Web services applications on the Liberty ID-WSF Web services framework.

The new specifications, currently available in draft form, are downloadable and usable by anyone.

"This announcement clearly shows that Liberty, as an organization, is healthy and able to deliver in a rapid manner against our members' requirements," said Timo Skytta, vice president of the Liberty Alliance and director of Web Services at Nokia.

The global consortium, whose members include Nokia, Ericsson, IBM, Sun Microsystems, France Telecom, VeriSign, Vodafone and AOL, released the second generation of its framework in February. This framework builds on the Liberty Identity Federation Framework, which first proposed using federated network identity, by providing a way to use identity-based Web services in that environment.

The framework provides a blueprint for extending network architectures to a federated Web services model and allows trusted partners, customers and suppliers to access key resources and information across corporate and network boundaries.

The new specs will be added to the two already supported in the ID-WSF called ID Personal Profile and IS Employee Profile. They are all deployable on the ID-WSF by service providers and enterprises.

"For the mobile environment these three services are very important. That's why we support the existing protocols for presence and geo-location--to make the integration of those services by middleware relatively simple," Skytta said.

Contact Book, Geo-location and Presence are the first service interface specifications developed by the Services Group within the Liberty Alliance. The services are all enabled at the discretion of the end user.

The Contact Book Service Interface provides a common method for managing and sharing personal or business contacts regardless of who provides the service. The Geo-location Service Interface provides an interoperable way to automatically identify a person's location in order to provide services like weather, news and travel to a chosen location. And the Presence Service Interface is a common way for users to share presence information (online, offline, on the phone or in a meeting) with any service provider. They were created to privately enhance user control of invoked Web services.

Skytta said several companies are piloting the ID-WSF. The alliance expects to see the first commercial deployment this year and large-scale deployments next year.