Standards are the key

Conforming to standards can be a challenge but it's often the case that making any particular technology work also involves working around all the slightly (or massively) incompatible edge cases. Web services are no different but as Confronting the Reality of Web Services points out, web services add a new piece to the puzzle.

Businesses have a need for a standard vocabulary, a way to describe every day things in a consistent manner. And if the need to do so externally is powerful, the need to do so internally is essential. I was struck by this statement:

A couple of years ago Cisco called a halt to all new IT efforts and spent over eighteen months and $300 million to resolve exactly these kinds of dissimilarities within the company. If any Web services tools could have made this work cheap, fast, and "easy," don't you think Cisco would have used them?

I stumbled onto a problem of this kind today where an enterprising group has created a web service on top of a system we took over some months ago. Unfortunately, they duplicated the simple structure of the old system and didn't describe things in reusable fragments, which is a problem that we'll need to sort out quickly. Argg! I'm busy enough already.

Anyway...

In a collaborative system of multiple IdP's, where precision of meaning in representation of claims and assertions is paramount, our vocabulary is going to be very important. Should we be documenting this publicly somewhere (is it already happening?) Perhaps something dangling off Digital identity would be a good place to start collecting the information? I'm not sure (and I'm already confused going back and forth between wiki short cut systems).

Among the more mundane (but interesting to me) things I have on my list is a need to learn more about the Internet2 (and Shibboleth) usPerson and eduPerson definition efforts. These sounded just like LDAP schema's which are under pinnings of todays directory systems. It's the boring part of creating an identity meta-system and at this point a lot of work appears undone.