Quantum information applications require the realization of certain gate set operations. For example, to do universal quantum computing, one needs access to Hadamard, pi/8 and control NOT gates together with standard state preparations and measurements. How can one recognize these in an experiment without assuming any prior knowledge on the system? The solution to this problem is a methodology of tomography that is self-consistent. Self-consistency is a property closely related to self-testing and gate set tomography, where the overall goal is to reconstruct the quantum states, gates and measurements jointly and only from the observable statistics from experiment. In this talk I will sketch the high level ideas which appear in my search for a definitive solution to this problem. The rest are details.