With the growth of the metadata feeds all over the world, together with the increased need for catering for multiple federations at once, Service Providers are increasingly reliant on the MetaData Query (MDQ) protocol, for Relying Party metadata lookup.
(MDQ is also commonly referred to as MDX (MetaData eXchange) for historical reasons: the name of a mailing list where the spec was discussed.) This protocol is however not widely deploy at this time, due to technical complexity

In addition, for For MDQ there is only one implementation in common use: pyFF. The MDQ protocol is quite simple however, This is a risk as it creates a high dependence on that piece of technology

This activity seeks to simplify the scalable use of MDQ, both for federations that currently operate a MDQ as well as for federations tat do not provide an MDQ service. In addition it wants to create an alternative implementation, next to pyFF, for creating and managing XML metadata.

Better uptimes for metadata availability and thus better uptimes for federeative federated identity management services.

An architecture for an alternative MDX solution was designed and a working PoC was implemented according to the specifications.