InCommon has approved the first three service providers for the Research & Scholarship (R&S) category: CILogon, the Prototype GENI Identity Portal, and the UW-Milwaukee CGCA Wiki. Service providers eligible for the R&S category include those that support research and scholarly activities such as virtual organizations and campus-based collaboration services.
Participating identity providers (IdPs) agree to release a minimal set of attributes to the R&S category (name, email address, user identifier, and affiliation). This can be done with a one-time modification to the IdP’s default attribute release policy, which applies to the entire R&S category. This provides a simpler and more scalable approach for IdPs than negotiating attribute release individually with every service provider.
The first three R&S services are:
- CILogon, which provides the NSF research community with credentials for secure access to cyberinfrastructure (CI). The service bridges the identity credentials generated by the nation’s universities, through InCommon, to a certificate for authentication to NSF’s cyberinfrastructure projects.
- The Prototype GENI Identity Portal, which will bridge InCommon to GENI, the Global Environment for Network Innovations. GENI is a distributed, federated research testbed for computer networking. Network researchers, primarily but not exclusively academic researchers, use to perform "at-scale" computer network experiments.
- The UW-Milwaukee CGCA Wiki supports collaborative research efforts in gravitation, cosmology, astrophysics, and astronomy for a number of faculty in the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Physics Department, as well as their colleagues throughout the world.
See the InCommon wiki for complete information about the R&S Category.