ImageWare Systems, a developer of biometric technology, has announced that they are creating a project called the Open Biometrics Initiative (OBI) intending to push biometric technology development in the open source software development environment. The OBI project will take place by ImageWare operating a forum that will be available to anyone in the open source community.
The first library that ImageWare will release to the community is OpenEBTS, which is an application programming interface for government management of biometric data.
OpenEBTS is intended to easily allow programmers to integrate biometric functionality into their applications. To ensure that anything developed by the open source community is usable by government and commercial entities, they will be working with Electronic Biometric Transmission Specification, which was created and is managed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. ImageWare officials are excited to see their project push the biometric market and give them more technology to work with when developing their own solutions. ![[end]](/resources/bullet/thirdfactor-4.gif)
