Initiative for Open Authentication (OATH) is an industry-wide collaboration to develop an open reference architecture using open standards to promote the adoption of strong authentication. It has close to thirty coordinating and contributing members and is proposing standards for a variety of authentication technologies, with the aim of lowering costs and simplifying their use.
Terminology
OATH should not be confused with OAuth, an open standard for authorization.
The OATH name is an Acronym from OpenAuTHentication, and is pronounced as the English word "oath".
References
Initiative For Open Authentication Wikipedia(Text) CC BY-SA