Liberty Alliance and Fidelity at 3GSM

During the February 12-15, I participated the 3GSM world congress, for the first time in my life. People have said that this is the most significant and largest event of the mobile industry. After seeing the event live, I can confirm this...

Me and my colleagues were invited to the Liberty Alliance booth to demonstrate the work that has been done in the Fidelity project. Basically, we have implemented four different circles of trust in four different European countries. So, what this practically means is that by letting the identity roam between these CoTs, the end-user is able to use services of a foreign CoT. So, there we were, four long days, showing the demonstrations again and again. Fortunately, there were three of us, and other people as well, so we had some time to check out the other booths of the exhibition. In addition to us, Ericsson showed some demonstrations from Fidelity, and Liberty Alliance staff (Andrew Shikiar and Dervla O'Reilly) presented general introductions to the work being done in the Liberty Alliance. All in all, very nice event, and it was really nice to get this opportunity to show our work.

About the event itself, well, I must say that this has been the biggest exhibition (or tradeshow, how should you categorize this) so far. I have not been in Cebit, which might be a good competitor for this, but for instance to compare this to the IST-2006 in Helsinki, where I also was, I would say this is eight times bigger; whereas IST-2006 had one big exhibition hall, here we had eight of them, of the same size. So, a lot to see and experience, and a lot of little (useless?) things to gather. From the booths I collected a USB-hub enabled mouse pad, laser pen, a few "stress balls", and a bunch of different kind of LED gadgets, among others. There was also quite many "mobile chicks", which the male visitors could enjoy. That is, nice looking models with very minimal clothing, promoting some products or companies. My colleague, Paavo, concentrated more on this aspect of the event :-).

During the 3GSM congress, the Liberty Alliance also organized a mobile deployment workshop, in which I gave a presentation/demonstration, together with Antoine de Poorter from Ericsson, amout the results of the Fidelity project. The workshop was attended by about 15 persons, which created a nice and warm athmosphere to present and discuss the deployments of the Liberty Alliance.

In summary, the 3GSM prooved to be a very good venue for showing the work we have done in the area of identity management. We met many interesting people, of which a few were such that some real cooperation, maybe in the format of joint project, could be initiated. We also got opportunity to promote our work within our own company, in the form of an intranet story.

ITU-T IdM

ITU-T has formed a new Focus Group on IdM, with the first meeting being organized on February 13th. It looks like this group, taking a telco-view to the IdM issues, will develop its own use cases and requirements, and then reference a lot to the existing standards, such as Liberty Alliance. Or this is what I hope for, because yet another framework for IdM seems to be a waste of time and resources to me. Well, we'll see what happens once this group really kicks off and starts to work.

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New year, new things

First of all, happy new year 2007 to everyone, who happens to read this blog (only me? ;-) Second of all, I think I will broaden the area of discussion to cover other things than what are in the scope of the topic of this blog. Why? Well, I'm not sure, but maybe I'm thinking of having just one blog for all the thoughts. And also, as the new Blogger allows to tagging of blog entries, it is quite easy to filter things to find and read what the reader is interested in.



Well, let's follow these new lines, and begin by writing about something that is totally out of scope of semantics and identities: health and exercising. I think I haven't mentioned this before, but I'm on my way to reduce body weight and getting into a better shape. From last summer, my body weight has gone down by about 10 kilos, but my aim is to further lower it by some 5-8 kilos. In the same time, the idea is to workout at the gym, thus, getting back the muscles I used to have when I was younger. Well, at this age this might be very hard, but I will do my best. While working out will give me good anaerobic fitness, I will also improve my aerobic fitness. Playing icehockey helps a lot, but because of its infrequency, I will need to do some jogging aside it. A couple of 10 kilometer loops in a week should keep up the base aerobic fitness level. And finally, going to work and back to home with bicycle will also help, because it will give me 22 kilometers of bicycling for the week days.



Now I just have to get back to gym, and get that jogging back to my schedules to make all this happen. I will try to post some news about my progress more or less regularly.

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Services anywhere, anytime, and anyhow?

We all have different kinds of computing devices; desktop computers, laptops, handtops, PDA devices, mobile phones, you name it. All these devices offer different kinds of usage patterns and allow accessing services in different ways. What would be really cool is to have the services be available, in a way or another, for all the devices capable of producing content for those services. Confusing? Maybe, so let's have an example.

I have multiple devices for taking pictures. Or for producing content for blogs. For instance, I take pictures with my Ixus digital camera or my mobile phone. I also write content to blogs using desktop/laptop computers and mobile phone. How could all these be integrated in such a way that for instance I could take a picture with my mobile phone, attach some text to it easily, maybe include some context data, and finally post the whole thing to my blog? Well, one way could be to first take the picture and upload it to some online picture album, such as Flickr or PicasaWeb. Then I would write the text, and upload it to the blog. Finally, I would attach the picture from the online picture album to the blog, and maybe tag the blog entry with some context-enabling keywords. Quite complicated?

At the moment, interfaces to all the services, or parts of them, are provided by different service providers. Flickr allows uploading pictures with various ways, and with various devices. Similarly, blog providers allow inserting entries with different kinds of interfaces; web upload, email, etc. What is missing is the real "glue" between all these, so that I could have a client from which I could just aggregate the service access with some nice way. Maybe Semantics and Web services, or preferably a combination of them - Semantic service composition - would provide an answer to this?

Testing with new Performancing

Performancing 1.3.5 should now support Blogger Beta, let's see if this shows up...

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Liberty meeting in Hong Kong

The Liberty Alliance is having a plenary meeting in Hong Kong. The Fidelity project was presented in the form of a general presentation during the opening plenary and demonstrations during the networking reception. Antoine de Poorter from Ericsson gave the general presentation, where the main emphasis were the findings from the Fidelity project in terms of Liberty specs and Liberty products.

The demonstrations comprised of three demo stations; one showing the authentication methods implemented in the project (presented by my colleague Jarkko Kaura), the other demonstrating our Inter-CoT (between TeliaSonera and France Telecom) use case called Book a Hotel and also the Nearest Restaurants use case (presented by me), and the third showing the Spanish services developed by Ericsson for the Amena's CoT (presented by Antoine).

Both the general presentation and the demonstrations were received well, and some further actions for cooperation between the Fidelity and Liberty were planned.

Google Reader gets even better

Those of you that already use Google Reader may have noticed that the tool has experienced a serious face lift. The user interface is far more intuitive, and the AJAX technologies even more used. Try for instance the shortcuts g then t and g then u, and see the cool popup selector.

For those of you, who have not used Google Reader before, but are following RSS/Atom feeds, this tool is definately recommended. And yes, one nice thing more; Google Reader works very well in mobile phone browsers as well. Check out the mobile version!

Liberty-enabled Google, Flickr, ...

When I'm logging into my blog, the Blogger Beta redirects me to the Google authentication, which usually just notices that I'm already logged in, and then redirects back to the Blogger Beta. Sounds familiar? I must admit that I don't know the details about how this really works, but it would seem like it could make use of Liberty technologies; Google authentication would act as IdP and all the other (Google) servies, including Blogger Beta, would act in the role of a SP?

Another thing is the integration of Blogger and Flickr. That is, you can post pictures from Flickr to Blogger. Now, if I remember correctly, the "linking" of these accounts required that you will get some sort of authentication token from Google authentication for Flickr. Flickr then uses this token (including credentials for posting to Blogger) when it sends pictures to the Blogger.

In fact, Flickr resembles IdP as well. If you would like to post pictures from other applications/web sites, you have to fetch an authentication token from them, and then inject this token into your posting application, which then presents it to the Flickr every time you post pictures with it. I would love to see Liberty taking care of all this!

Publication of Fidelity results

As the Fidelity project approaches its ending, we should have forums where we disseminate our results. We already will be in Liberty meetings and IST-2006, but some academic forums would also needed.

Maybe the security&privacy track in WWW2007 conference would be an ideal place?

Analogy between Fidelity CoCoT and Star Alliance?

Star Alliance
Originally uploaded by laukkanen_mikko.

In Fidelity we have multiple interconnected CoTs, thus, we can call them Circle of Circle of Trust (CoCoT). The question is, how should this concept be familiarized to the end-users? Maybe we could use the airline alliances as examples? We could advertise the CoCoT by naming it "Fidelity Alliance", and once you join any of the alliance members, you are offered the choice to join the Fidelity Alliance also? And then when service providers are part of the Fidelity Alliance, they would follow the scheme of the airline companies; "TeliaSonera, a member of the Fidelity Alliance"?

On the way to Fidelity project meeting

The second last management meeting of the Fidelity project is about to begin in the Telenor premises in Oslo. The only bad thing is that I'm (together with my colleagues) are still sitting in the cafeteria of the Helsinki-Vantaa airport. Our early morning flight was cancelled, due to some technical problems in Blue1 plane, so we have been rebooked to the next available Oslo flight, which will take off at 11:40. So we will miss the morning sessions, but what can you do... thanks a lot Blue1. And for the four hour waiting we were rewarded with huge 10 euro voucher for getting something to eat. Wow!

Taking off with the new Blogger Beta

The new features, mainly back end database and tagging, made me begin with the new Blogger Beta. My earlier blogs are still at the "old" Blogger server, so I will first get used to this new Beta with this blog, and once everything seems to be working (including the tools for posting to blog, performancing plugin, etc), I'll merge those other blogs into this Beta.

Anyway, this blog is about my research, which aims at PhD. The target of my research is to look if semantic web technologies and identity (management) could be integrated, if so, how could it be done; how does the semantic web benefit from the identity management, and vice versa. And also, what kind of different perspectives would we have into this "merger"; end-users, service providers, service hosts (identity providers), and so on. And what kind of actors would be winners in this game. All these questions hopefully gets answered in my dissertation, which I hope to finish at some point during the next year.

Well, watch this space, there's more to come :-)