An experiment into interoperability

WAYLAND, MASSACHUSETTS: An Authentication Interoperability Experiment will soon test standard ways of transferring authentication information between OGC clients and OGC services using existing mechanisms such as HTTP Authentication, HTTP Cookies, SSL/X509, SAML, Shibboleth, OpenID and WS-Security.

The Open Geospatial Consortium Inc. (OGC) will launch an Authentication Interoperability Experiment on 2 October, 2009. The initiators of the experiment seek participation by other organizations interested in developing standard ways of implementing authentication and related security capabilities in applications involving OGC Web Services standards.

The purpose of this experiment, as explained in a press note, is to develop a candidate OGC Best Practices document that documents standard ways of performing authentication in applications that implement OGC Web Services standards. The goal is to provide guidance about authentication to implementers of solutions and to organizations that seek to deploy such solutions. It is the belief of the initiators that if such a document is made available more OGC compliant commercial products that natively support authentication will be offered by vendors.

The OGC members that are acting as initiators of the Interoperability Experiment are CubeWerx, Sierra Systems Group, Inc. and others.

OGC is an international industry consortium of more than 385 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available interface specifications. OpenGIS Specifications support interoperable solutions that ‘geo-enable’ the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT.