Public Comment: INCITS Biometric Identity Assurance Services (BIAS)

Members of the OASIS BISA TC reported that the INCITS 45-day public
review of the BIAS standard (INCITS 442, INCITS Project 1823-D, sister
standard to the OASIS BIAS Messaging Protocol) opened on 3-August-2007
and closes on 17-September-2007. The INCITS document M1/07-0360 sets
the requirements for the OASIS work. The OASIS Biometric Identity
Assurance Services (BIAS) Integration TC complements the efforts of
the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards
(INCITS),

to provide the biometrics and security
industries with a documented, open framework for deploying and invoking
identity assurance capabilities that can be readily accessed as services.
The OASIS BIAS Integration TC defines and describes methods and bindings
by which the INCITS BIAS framework can be used within XML-based
transactional Web services and service-oriented architectures. From
the Introduction: "Biometric technologies are being used today in a
wide variety of applications and environments. At the same time,
enterprises -- both commercial and government -- have been moving
towards services-based architectures as the framework for their
enterprise infrastructures. As biometrics become a larger part of the
greater identity assurance capability, the need to access these services
remotely across those services-oriented frameworks will become
necessary. A current gap exists in standards related to the use of
biometric technology in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). The
Biometric Identity Assurance Services (BIAS) standard is intended to
fill that gap by defining a framework for deploying and invoking
biometrics-based identity assurance capabilities that can be readily
accessed using services (e.g., Web services). Development of this
standard necessarily requires expertise in two distinct technology
domains -- biometrics and service architectures. The two standards
organizations that are the leaders in these areas are INCITS and OASIS
respectively. The work has been partitioned between the two
organizations such that INCITS develops an INCITS standard for
biometric services and OASIS develops an OASIS standard for the Web
services integration. These two standards will be separate but
interrelated. The BIAS standard will help ensure biometric-based
solutions are robust and maintainable, while providing a mechanism
for accessing an organization's biometric services. BIAS should
significantly increase the functional opportunities for implementing
identity related functions in a services-oriented framework, allowing
for platform and application independence."