Feature Company

Interview with Alessandro Triglia and Grace Sigona of OSS Nokalva Inc.
April 2005

FB

Can you tell us about your BioFoundry suite of tools and the ability to maintain standards based biometric solutions?

OSS

The BioFoundry suite is a set of standards based development tools. These middleware products allow developers to quickly build standards compliant solution while enhancing their product reliability, and reducing development and lifecycle costs. The BioFoundry tools support BioAPI 1.1, and the ANSI X9.84 standards. We are committed to supporting BioAPI 2.0 and related standards as they progress.

The BioFoundry® BioAPI Framework is a full implementation of the BioAPI 1.1 specification.

The BioFoundry® BSP Builder is a tool that enables vendors of biometric hardware devices and biometric algorithms to easily create fully BioAPI-conformant BSPs which implement all standard features of BioAPI BSPs, including enrollment, verification, identification, and database management

BioFoundry® X9.84 is an implementation of the ANSI X9.84 standard, providing an easy-to-use API that enables applications to handle X9.84 messages and perform cryptographic operations on biometric data.

FB

Was 2004 a good year for your company?

OSS

It was. One of the significant changes we found from prior years is that we, as the vendor, no longer had to make the argument as to why standards are important. Customers came to us already convinced that they were looking for standards based solutions and standards based tools.

These customers are either themselves seeing the benefits of following the standards, or are being driven by requirements that are being defined to them.

FB

Your comments reflect exactly what surfaced as the most pressing issue facing the industry during our Year In Review, that being the need for standards and interoperability.

OSS

Yes, we are finding that our clients have discovered that by using our products, they can develop and deploy standards based solutions more rapidly. We recently responded to a questionnaire from a government agency, an RFI that was issued, that was extremely focused on wanting standards based components in all the solutions. Everyone is talking about interoperability as a requirement to achieve market growth.

Solution developers and customers of solutions are finding that there is a need for standards conformance certification. We have heard so many complaints about “conformance” and the very subjective interpretation

of what conformance means. It is critical to clearly identify what set of criteria are met for conformance to be achieved. Without this clear identification neither developers, nor customers of solutions, can have reliably met expectations.

FB

What are some of the advantages of your BioFoundry suite of tools?

OSS

If we take a look at the components themselves:

1) We offer the BioFoundry BioAPI 1.1 framework, which is a very robust implementation of the BioAPI 1.1 specification. The BioAPI framework, as are all of our biometric products, is supported on a 24x7 basis, worldwide, by our expert technical team. Quality software and support, critical in the fast growing biometrics market, distinguishes our product from other opensource solutions.

2) Our BioFoundry BSP Builder is a tool, which helps developers to more easily build BioAPI compliant BSPs, or to take existing non-compliant BSPs and make them compliant. We have a customer who within a week or two of receiving the BSP Builder was able to take two non-compliant BSPs from a third party vendors, and make them compliant without needing a detailed knowledge of the BioAPI specification.

3) Our X9.84 component is an implementation of the X9.84 standard. Here again, I can offer an example of the tool’s ease of use, and clear benefit. We had a customer who rather late in his project cycle was presented with a requirement to be X9.84 compliant. Our customer had no experience with this standard, and quickly and easily was able to develop a compliant solution.

We are currently working on a BioAPI 2.0 framework implementation, which will include a BioAPI 2.0 BSP template, and we will offer BSP adapters, which will allow developers to build applications using the BioAPI 2.0 framework and BioAPI 1.1 BSPs while BioAPI 2.0 BSPs are being developed. Applications can then work with BioAPI 1.1 BSPs, and/or BioAPI 2.0 BSPs.

There has been some discussion within M1 and SC37 about multibiometric fusion. As a result of that discussion OSS Nokalva submitted to M1 a new project proposal for an amendment to BioAPI 1.1 in support of multibiometric fusion. This has yet to be approved by M1, but the likelihood of approval is high. You will probably see a national standards project for the support of multibiometric fusion within BioAPI. This is very good news because fusion is really important in many applications.

In our BioAPI 1.1 framework we would of course support fusion, as we will with the BioAPI 2.0 framework. We are also involved in the development of the Biometric Interworking Protocol (BIP) standard and one of the things that we are looking at doing is, of course, when that standard becomes finalized, providing a means to support a BIP enabled framework. We are currently looking at ways to migrate users from a BioAPI 1.1 framework to a BIP enabled framework.

FB

Can you give a sense of the timing around some of these elements?

OSS

The final ballot for two key ISO standards in the area of biometric architectures, BioAPI 2.0 and CBEFF, will begin in SC37 approximately at the end of April. The publication of these two standards by ISO, expected later this year, will be a milestone, but SC37 is working on many other important standards projects. Some examples are the technical report on multibiometric fusion, the Conformance Testing Methodology for BioAPI 2.0, and the Biometric Interworking Protocol (BIP), which enables standardized communications between networked biometrics systems. Those projects will likely be finalized in 2006.

There is intense standardization activity at the national level as well, where M1 is working on many important standards projects such as the Conformance Testing Methodology for the ANSI version of BioAPI, which will probably be completed before the end of this year. OSS is current under contract to develop a conformance test suite for BioAPI for a U.S. Government agency.

The OSS BioFoundry portfolio will be considerably expanded this year to support many of the new activities we have discussed. We are working on several new additions/enhancements to support BioAPI 2.0 – a BioAPI 2.0 framework, and adapters that will support using BioAPI 1.1 BSPs with a BioAPI 2.0 framework; multibiometric fusion; BIP; and BioGUI. We will also be porting our portfolio to new platforms and provide support for a wider variety of application development languages.

FB

With so much activity in the standards area, how does this impact your business?

OSS

It presents terrific opportunities for us. This is exactly our area of expertise - we provide products, consulting and services. Also the adoption of standards really allows the biometrics industry to take off. Once you have standards based solutions and interoperability a lot of barriers that are slowing the industry down are eliminated. So for all the vendors in the industry it is a very positive thing.

One of the things we introduced last year is that we segmented our biometrics group into a separate division called the BioFoundry Division. This is an indication of our commitment to standards based solutions in biometrics. We also have some new product components in the works that will make the development and deployment of biometric solutions even easier!

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