Re: [board] Proposed Charter for OASIS Web Services Federation (WSFED) TC

["GOURMELEN Gael RD-MAPS-LAN" <gael.gourmelen@orange-ftgroup.com>]

Title: Re: [board] Proposed Charter for OASIS Web Services Federation (WSFED) TC

In response to the request for OASIS member comment, France Telecom comments on the WS-Fed TC proposal are the following :

It seems that this TC proposal recognises that this TC is overlapping with other specifications, and more particularly with specifications produced by OASIS.

It is quite strange, and not normal to have a standard bodie that will produce two overlapping specifications…
 
1. In the section regarding similar works, it is not very clear what is meant by "The proposers of this TC seek involvement from authors of other such activities and the contribution of their expertise and experience, and intend to work in harmony with them in the creation of the product of this technical committee ".

It would be better to use the specifications that have already been produced on the federation (e.g. SAML TC Specifications) in the WSFED TC, instead of only requiring the involvment of the actors that have worked on SAML. The work on this WSFED TC could be done within the SAML TC. Most of the targeted functionalities that are spoken about in this charter are quite the same with SAML (Federation, SSO, Sign-Out, ...) with the same defined entities/roles : Identity Provider, Service/Resource Provider, Principal, Attribute Service, Authorization Service, ...

2. In the Applicable work section: This is quite surprising that SAML is not mentionned in the Applicable work since SAML is really dealing with the same functions and therefore is applicable. This is very surprising also, given the fact that SAML is produced by the same standard organisation !  This is not very acceptable from a standard organisation perspective.

 
Globally, the charter of the TC is quite "long" and describes technical details in depth, and seems to be quite too detailed at this early TC proposal stage. The work seems to make already references to some WS-* specifications which quite constraints the charter for the future work."

Regards,
Gaël Gourmelen

France Telecom / Orange