Paul Madsen replied on my blog “Never get lost again while federating“:

I don’t have quite the same amount of faith as Bavo De Ridder does in Liberty Alliance’s new intro to our specification set.

I know I’ve heard ‘recalculating’ countless times from another system that makes the same claim.

Liberty Alliance’s new representation of their specifications may not be perfect (and it surely isn’t) but at least it is a step up from the previous list of PDF files and will hopefully make it more clear to some people.

In the last few weeks I had to explain several times to people what federation was and what it isn’t and how the different specifications relate. At the same time, some people caught me on some errors and corrected me. People familiar with federation probably know there is a lot of misinformation out there, not in the least from vendors and in particular their sales-force. For the moment federation seems to be the magical bullet that will solve everything costly identity management suites apparently are not capable to.

Simple graphical representations, like the one Liberty Alliance has placed on their site, surely help in clarifying some of the misunderstandings out there. It is however only a (very) small part of the overall picture, a picture that is getting more complicated by the day and therefore harder to grasp. Graphical representations are not that magical bullet either, you still need to understand each of the blocks individually.

But all this still leaves my question standing:

Is there anyone out there brave enough to take all existing identity work and show their relationship in one graphic?