Joining the Federation

Computerworld - Information technology, along with its cousin biotechnology, is a big driver of the dynamic lexicon. Biotechnologists usually coin words about biological things from thin air or revert to dusty Greek or Latin to introduce words into English. IT likes to recycle language, adding heft to the dictionary with new uses for old words.
The latest word to be reinvented by IT is federation. It describes technology unions relying on new forms of data integration. Federation languished for eons in the linguistic backwaters, competing with the likes of league and union to describe political liaisons, for better or for worse. Reinvented with a techno spin, it's now as hot as lofts in a gentrified warehouse district.
The movement to recast federation got its impetus with identity management around 2002. Various industry bodies like the Liberty Alliance and OASIS were drawing up standards to enable the joining of trusted networks into even larger chains of trust. Some technical thinker had a eureka moment and correlated a lesson from political history, ergo federated identities. Federated identities gave rise to federated networks. (If you are a purist, maybe that's backward.)
Federated networks are just getting started, but they will be huge in delivering authenticated and authorized users for secure e-commerce communities in the wired and wireless worlds. Secure users are key to streamlining supply and distribution chains for more efficient business. Federation in identity management has even morphed into a verb form: Federate now to put your islands of identity to work authorizing, controlling and logging your users' access for compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
Federation quickly achieved rock-star status as a recycled word, joining instance, image, parent and child, cache and bus among the panoply of innocuous words blessed by technology with a new meaning. The word federation has become fecund and given rise to more federation -- federated management, federated configurations, federated databases, federated directories, federation ad infinitum. Integrating discrete elements is passe; it simply won't do if one can federate and achieve a higher order of interoperability.
And making data structures interoperate more efficiently is the central theme underlying federation of all types. Virtual directories provide the foundation for enterprise information integration, or EII, a layer of abstraction to bring widely distributed and decentralized islands of data into a unified whole. Virtual directories were not invented to facilitate federated identities, but federated networks would be nowhere without virtual directory technologies, which unite islands of identity data into a centralized management framework for stronger security.
With virtual directories, there's no need to