For end users

The centerpiece of Higgins is a browser add-on that helps you log into websites and apps, manage your digital identities, and control the sharing of your personal information. This add-on, called a selector, offers a consistent, secure, privacy-enhancing user experience that works across a range of identity protocols (e.g. Infocard, OpenID, HTML forms, SAML, etc.). The selector acts as the client portion of a cloud-based identity agent that manages permissioned data sharing of personal information stored in the agent and elsewhere.

For developers

The Higgins project also provides a set of identity-related web services, attribute services and code libraries that are useful in their own right. Higgins provides two kinds of Identify Services: services for Identity Providers (IdPs) and for Relying Parties (RPs). For IdP's there is a Security Token Service (STS) that supports WS-Trust. There is also a SAML IdP that supports the SP-initiated SSO profile and issues SAML 2.0 assertions. Higgins also includes the Relying Party libraries necessary to enable websites and systems to request and accept Information Cards. Developers can incorporate this relying party code into their applications and web sites to make it easier for users to login.

Underneath the selector apps and web services just mentioned lies an identity management abstraction layer. This layer consists of a software framework that can be extended using plugins. The lowest layer of this framework is the Identity Attribute Service (IdAS) that provides an interoperability and portability across silos of identity data. IdAS provides read/write access to a wide variety of data sources including LDAP directories and can be extended using plugins called Context Providers. The IdAS service maps identity and social network data into the Higgins Context Data Model. IdAS makes it possible to mash up identity and social network data across highly heterogeneous data sources including directories, relational databases, and social networks.

Additional web services include AS - an Attribute Service that provides RESTful bindings (using a variety of protocols such as XDI, Plaxo Portable Contacts, etc.) over IdAS; and XDI4J - a java support library for working with XDI.