Introduction

As part of its planning process for the workplan for 2011-2012, REFEDs has identified 5 clear objectives for its initial start-up period:

  • REF1: Raising the Profile of REFEDs and REFEDS Coordination;
  • REF2: Barriers to Effective Federation Use;
  • REF3: Boundary Solutions;
  • REF4: Federation harmonisation;
  • REF5: Interfederation;
  • REF6: Identity assurance.

Documents related to this work will be uploaded here.

 

 

REF1: Raising the Profile of REFEDs

OWNERS

  • Nicole Harris (JISC Advance), Licia Florio (TERENA), Christian Gijtenbeek (TERENA).

AIM

  • To strengthen the voice of the combined research and education federations internationally in identity and access fora to achieve directed input rather than individual contributions. To empower REFEDs members to talk on behalf of the community and clearly identity research and education requirements in these fields.


WORK ITEMS

  • Coordination of the various prioritised work items and overall reporting. (15 days)
  • Establish a clear web presence for REFEDs. (10 days)
  • Review and improve the quality of information about federations and entities provided by REFEDs. This also includes establishing points of contacts with dependable communications for all major R&E federations and VOs. (4 days)
  • REFEDs Promotion. (4 days)
  • Improve the presence and coordination of REFEDs and its members in international fora such as Kantara and provide feedback to relevant work in the GN3 project
  • Organising two main REFEDs meetings per year. (10 days)


DOCUMENTS & OUTPUT

 

 

REF2: Barriers to Effective Federation Use

OWNERS

  • Nicole Harris, Andrew Cormack, Diego Lopez, Steven Carmody, WAYF.dk.


AIM

  • To simplify the process for integrating new Service Providers in to federations, to effectively communicate changes in federation process to Service Providers and to gain economies of scale for all federations from domestication tools.


WORK ITEMS

  • Address the concerns of Publishers in relation to the current process for joining and understanding the requirements of research and education federations;
  • Create a strategy for engaging with domesticated applications
  • Provide recommendations to harmonise federation policies
  • A revised version of the Discovery Project was presented at the REFEDS Meeting in Prague (May 2011); the proposed work is part of the REFEDS 2011 - 2012 workplan.


DOCUMENTS

Barriers for Service Providers

Service Provider Study Results - this work will be carried included in the work plan for REFEDS 2011 - 2012.

Federation Policy Mapping

Federation Policy Best Practise Approach

Discovery Project

 

 

REF3: Boundary Solutions

OWNERS

  • Jaime Perez (RedIRIS), David Simonsen (WAYF).

AIM

  • To improve the experience of users in non-federation environments. Many resources used on a regular basis by research and education users are not able to take full advantage of the federated experience for a variety of reasons. This workpackage will seek to make the interaction with such resources easier for users of federated identity via proxy and router solutions.


WORK ITEMS

  • Develop a repository accessed and controlled by the federation to manage the configuration rules for rewriting proxies;

 

PROPOSALS

 

 

REF 4: Federation Harmonisation

OWNERS

  • Mikael Linden and Steven Carmody

AIM

  • To work across education and research federations to align technologies, policies and schema where harmonisation benefits have been identified. To align direction of education and research federations with broader communities where appropriate.

WORK ITEMS

  • Define models of attribute release suitable for IdPs and SPs worldwide. The work is carried out by the Attribute-release WG whose aim is to achieve consensus on a framework that Federations, IDPs, and SPs could adopt that would allow attribute release via a simple user experience. See [1] for more information on the developments.
  • Achieve agreement on the use and of eduPerson attributes across REFEDs members and make recommendations for appropriate extensions to the eduPerson schema;
  • Support the integration of the SAML2 international profile amongst REFEDs members. REFEDS will work to provide a home for SAML2int profile.

 

DOCUMENTS

 

 

REF 5: Interfederation

OWNERS

Lucy Lynch, Nicole Harris, Leif Johansson, Ken Klingenstein

AIM

  • To explore all avenues of interfederation to create business models that work in a variety of contexts for the interfederation experience.

WORK ITEMS

  • Understanding issues for providing metadata for shared community resources (e.g. the REFEDs wiki, the spaces wiki, the Czech medical atlas, etc;
  • Support the implementation of eduGain and make appropriate recommendations to eduGain regarding issues around implementation and use.


DOCUMENTS

 

 

REF 6: Identity Assurance

OWNERS

AIM

  • Explore all avenues of inter-federation to create business models that work in a variety of contexts for the inter-federation experience

WORK ITEMS

  • Evaluate the current InCommon Silver and Kantara assurance frameworks to produce a recommendation for an assurance profile to be used across R&E federations

[Note: during the latest REFEDs meeting it was agreed to make this work-item active].

DOCUMENTS

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