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Background
InCommon is implementing a simplified and scalable approach for providing services that support Research and Scholarship activities at its member institutions by defining a Research and Scholarship (R&S) category for Service Providers.
A growing number of Service Providers (SPs) supporting collaborative Research and Scholarship activities are joining InCommon. As is the standard practice in the Higher Education/Research world, collaboration on these sites involves knowing who the collaborators are: name, email, institutional affiliation. Unfortunately, the default Attribute Release Policies in place at most campus Identity Providers (IdPs) do not share any information with these sites without local review of the SP's purpose, governing policy, and operational practices. This approach is simply not scalable to the thousands of campus IdPs and thousands of SPs supporting research and scholarship that we anticipate in the future. It is already a serious problem for the big Virtual Organizations and Research Labs; the hoped-for explosion of smaller collaboration sites housed in academic departments will not succeed with federation unless without a scalable solution is developed.
InCommon is implementing a simplified and scalable approach to this problem through the specification of a "Research and Scholarship (R&S)" category for SPs. All InCommon SPs have are already agreed to bound by a set of practices governing how they manage and use personal attributes. To qualify for inclusion in the InCommon's R&S category , SPs comply with defines an additional set of criteria that are designed to facilitate IdP policy decisions to release a controlled set of low-risk attributes to R&S SPs without local review for each SP. InCommon also provides metadata and technology tools to further facilitate automatic, but controlled, release of attributes to the R&S SPs, as well as aiding user support.
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- Service Providers
- TBA
- Identity Providers
- TBA
What Are Research and Scholarship Activities?
Candidate Services
The three traditional dimensions of the academic endeavor are: research & scholarship, instruction, and service. The R&S category identifies SPs that are specifically designed to support some aspect of research and scholarship; SPs aimed to enable instruction or service do not qualify for this category, even if they are intended for use by academics. Likewise, SPs that provide generalized services that have been or might be adopted for use in support of research and scholarship activities, but whose primary purpose is not research and scholarship, are not included in the R&S category.
Whether an SP operator is commercial or non-commercial is not relevant to eligibility for the R&S category, nor are any other aspects of how the service is implemented or operated, beyond the specific requirements noted below. It's all about purpose.
InCommon has chosen to introduce service categories in a conservative way, i.e., by focusing narrowly on services purposed for research and scholarship, in order to narrowly focus the range of concerns that the InCommon community may raise with particular prospective R&S SPs. Other service categories may be defined in the future for other purposes.Wiki Markup
Requirements for the R&S Category
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- The service enhances the research and scholarship activities of some subset of the InCommon community.
- The service requires a subset of R&S Category Attributes. (See below.)
- The service does not require out-of-band negotiation and/or contracts with IdPs.
- The service conforms to a specific subset of the Recommended Practices published by InCommon.
- The SP is a production SAML deployment.
- The SP supports SAML V2.0 Web Browser SSO.
- The SP refreshes and verifies metadata at least daily.
- The SP's metadata has been provided to InCommon so that it can be published in a human-readable format on the InCommon public web site.
- The SP provides appropriate contacts in the metadata.
- The SP provides its requested attributes in metadata, chosen from . (Note that requests for attributes outside of the R&S subset.set will likely require prior agreement with IdP Operators.)
- The SP intelligently handles errors involving the release of requested attributes.
R&S Service Providers must resolve issues of non-compliance within a reasonable period of time from when they become aware of the issue. Failure to do so can result in revocation of their membership in the R&S category.
R&S Category Attributes
InCommon IdPs are strongly encouraged to release the following attributes to R&S Category SPs:
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R&S Category SPs may request other attributes, but those requests are not likely to be honored by IdPs unless there has been prior agreement with the IdP OperatorIdP Operators will likely require a prior agreement before releasing those additional attributes. It is highly recommended that SPs use a minimalist approach to attribute requests. In the future, if InComon InCommon interfederates with Federations in other parts of the world, IDPs in other countries may be operating under laws and regulations which require a true minimalist approach.
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