Web 2.0's need of Liberty ID-WSF

Yesterday, I spoke at the Liberty 2.0 workshop on the subject of Web 2.0. I took the position that Web 2.0 applications needed the functionality presented by Liberty ID-WSF to provide rich, useful mashup applications.

I started with the poster-child web 2.0 mashup of Google's Google Earth 3D mapping/imagery product with Fboweb's FAA tracking data (to present real-time flight tracking in 3D of planes landing or taking off from a number of different US airports). The picture below was a live 3D image of aircraft in the landing pattern at ATL this past Sunday morning(1/22/07).

I examined how the application worked and a series of what-ifs related to such applications including:

• What if the data wasn't free and therefore required user identity to access.
• What if the application wanted to pull in user based information (spousal tracking -- where my wife could track the one flight I was on).
• What if the application were implemented as a light weight web application (as opposed to a local heavy client).
• What if the release of data from one of the back end applications required user consent.
• How does all of these what-if's apply in a multi-layered web application mashup (makes the problem even more complex).

While some of these may appear to be specific to this application, they apply to pretty much any application mashup. Once you move away from free, open data, you need identity and once you move away from client based mashups to server hosted mashups, the requirements are all the same.

Of course, my position is that the work done in Liberty ID-WSF anticipates and solves the needs such requirements add to the applications and I show how things would work in such an environment. This, in conjunction with Eve's presentation on ID-WSF 2.0 at the same workshop can be looked at as a very good primer to the concepts, technologies, and use cases surrounding the ID-WSF work.

You can see my presentation as well as the other presentations yesterday (including a second presentation I made about Liberty's advanced client work) at the workshop web page.

Happy reading (although it is mostly pictures :-)).

Tags : identity / Liberty / Web 2.0 / Liberty Alliance / Google Earth / FAA / fboweb / mashup / id-wsf