IMAGINE having the autonomy to manage your own identity on the Internet.

You, the individual, would be in charge of a file that contains the various things that identify you — name, tax number, identity card number, home and work addresses, telephone numbers, account numbers, client or customer numbers with various companies, and so on.

You decide what each company, public agency or other organisation sees of these details. You can edit, at a keystroke, each record in your file; if you change your home address, for example, you need just update your personal file, and the change will be published to all of these institutions at a keystroke.

This is the idea behind the Higgins Trust Framework initiative, originally launched by the Eclipse Foundation in December 2004 under the name Eclipse Trust Framework.

The initiative consists of a set of open source protocols that allow people to store their digital identities on their own PCs, and to decide how to share each component of that identity with the various parties they conduct business with.

Higgins is named not after the character Professor Henry Higgins from the Broadway musical My Fair Lady, but after a species of longtailed mouse native to Tasmania, Australia, explains IBM Malaysia’s Balwinder Gill, country manager for Tivoli software.

“Traditional industries have a ‘long tail’ of micro-markets that complement them, such as the new markets that have evolved around online auctions, and these markets will benefit from greater online collaboration,” Balwinder says.

The concept was developed by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the law school in renowned Harvard University, Balwinder says.

The concept breaks up an identity into pieces, or “services,” and lets individual users — or a third-party service provider acting for them — dictate who may access each service and for what purpose.

Companies, government agencies and other organisations will inturn need to deploy Higgins-enabled software.

Novell distinguished engineer Dale Olds has speculated that the Higging Trust Framework would give consumers greater control over their identities, and businesses new ways to form relationships with their customers.