Page History

...

Background

InCommon is implementing a simplified and scalable approach for its member institutions to provide services that support research and scholarship activities. The approach is to implement a Research and launching a new service to make it easier for participants to provide collaborative services; and for faculty, researchers, and scientists to use those services. The new Research & Scholarship (R&S) Category for category will apply to service providers that is designed to facilitate attribute release decisions by identity providerssupport research and scholarship activities, like virtual organizations and campus-based collaborative services. Participating identity providers will agree to release a minimal set of attributes to the R&S category, a simpler and more scalable approach than negotiating such release with every service provider.

Background

A growing number of Service Providers (SPs) supporting collaborative Research research and Scholarship scholarship activities are joining InCommon. As is the standard practice in the Higher Education/Research higher education and 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 Labsvirtual organizations and research labs; the hoped-for explosion of smaller collaboration sites housed in academic departments will not succeed with federation without a scalable solution.

...