People know I’m an XDI nut and Eve Maler is an UMA nut. And some people wonder if there isn’t a whole lot of overlap between UMA and XDI (and why Eve and I are not fighting a protocol jihad).
Well, the truth is, Eve and I are good friends (especially since I learned she lives just across Lake Washington from me). We even wrote an IEEE article on the Venn of Identity together. We share a passion for open standards that can really make a difference. And for the longest time the issue was simply that we couldn’t find the time to sit down and discuss the two.
But recently we’ve had a chance to start drilling into the synergies between UMA and XDI.
And they are legion. Enough so I don’t have the time to go into them in this post (but plan on more coming soon – ideally in a blogging duet with Eve). But what I do want to do right away is point readers to an excellent paper summarizing UMA that Eve prepared for the W3C Privacy and Data Usage Control Workshop. It does a great job of explaining the problem space and how UMA approaches it.