Superpatterns

Live from Dublin at the Liberty eGovernment Forum
[ federation libertyalliance ]
I'm in Dublin today at Liberty's eGovernment Forum, demonstrating Access Manager to government delegates from across Europe - so far I've spoken to one German, two French, a Finn, a smattering of Irish and even a Brit. Here is a very boring picture of the demo display - it's a small room with 6 vendors, so laptops all round.
Apologies for the poor picture quality - it was taken with my Sony Clie PDA (no flash) in quite low light. I'll post better pictures as they become available. The sign in the middle reads "Sun Microsystems - Live with Liberty".
Anyway, the machine on the right is showing a very interesting demo involving Liberty's ID-FF, ID-WSF and ID-SIS specifications. The scenario is that a civil servant in one government department can access resources across other departments without having to authenticate to each department in turn. Further, our civil servant's personal data (such as mailing address) is only stored in his 'home' department (the identity provider), so if another department wants to, say, send a copy of a report by mail, they use Liberty's Discovery Service to find the Personal Profile (PP) Service and query the PP service for the civil servant's mailing address. The Interaction Service allows the 'home' department to confirm the release of this data before responding.
Believe me, it is all much more seamless than it sounds. So much so that sometimes I have to back up and explain why this is clever and how you'd have to do it in the absence of Liberty - either syncing a bunch of data around all the govt departments or having our civil servant type his mailing address again and again.