This page documents a thought experiment regarding the potential "production" interfederation between the UK and InCommon federations. The existence of this page does not imply that any action will be taken.
Given the many similarities between the UK and InCommon federations, it may be productive to pursue interfederation between these two federations in parallel with more general interfederation efforts such as eduGAIN.
Roadmap
Here we list tasks that could be undertaken to enable UK+InCommon interfederation, ignoring when these tasks might be done.
- InCommon and UK give permission to consume each other's metadata. Ideally this would be a blanket agreement and not be per-entity.
- UK has an agreement document ready for this.
- A process for federation members to opt-in (opt-out?) to interfederation. (Hopefully this is not needed?)
- InCommon first exports SPs only to UK, then later exports IdPs. (Don't want a long-term asymmetric agreement.)
- Disclosures of InCommon and UK operational processes (particularly around entity registration).
- UKFTS draft documents
- See InCommon Federation Operating Policies and Practices at https://www.incommon.org/policies.
- InCommon has an internal document on registration practices.
- REFEDS work item REF13-2 includes a Federation Operation Practices template.
- InCommon metadata containing <mdrpi:RegistrationInfo> elements. (UK metadata already includes these.)
- InCommon makes new interfederation metadata aggregate available to its members. (Current InCommon metadata aggregate doesn't change for this.)
- UK metadata includes InCommon entities, first in "test" aggregate then eventually in production aggregate per UK Interfederation Trial.