1. In a networked computing environment comprising federations, wherein a federation comprises two or more organizations coupled in a fashion such that authentication and authorization statements span the organizations in accordance with a pre-defined policy, a method comprising a first computing system performing the following: storing on a physical computer readable medium a data structure, wherein the data structure defines a communication policy for a federation including the first computing system, and comprises fields including at least one or more grouping of metadata about a first federation or about an organization within the first federation, the metadata including information about the organization and structure of the first federation or the organization within the first federation, wherein at least one of the one or more groupings of metadata about the first federation or about an organization within the first federation are included in the data structure without including explicitly defined metadata, but rather by a reference to explicitly defined metadata in a block of federation metadata in a different data structure, the block of federation metadata being used for storing metadata including explicitly defined information about the organization and structure of at least one other federation or organization; wherein the data structure further comprising storing inherited federation metadata for the first federation, wherein the inherited federation metadata for the first federation is included in the data structure by virtue of the first federation being hierarchically below a second federation to which the inherited federation metadata also applies such that the inherited federation metadata is inherited from the second federation by the first federation; and communicating with a second computing system in the federation using the communication policy.