REFEDS has recently announced a Call for Proposals for MET2. The deadline for submission of this work is 30 May 2013.
Feedback on the Metadata Explorer Tool (MET).
Other tools doing similar things:
Problems:
- Federation metadata is not automatically refreshing.
- When federation metadata is manually updated, entities that are no longer in a federation are flagged as 'orphan entities' in the initial report, but there is no further way to view this list of orphans.
- Orphan entities are still be included in the IdP and SP count for individual federations when federation metadata is manually refreshed, but not in the total entities figure - i.e. Aconet currently reads 90 = 34 + 58 (clearly incorrect) as at 28 March 2013.
Points:
- Interface looks nice and tidy.
- I like that the MDUI Elements are supported (including logos!).
Features Requests:
- If there is an MDUI DisplayName available, it would be useful to display this in addition to the entityId. E.g. "Universität Zürich https://aai-logon.uzh.ch/idp/shibboleth". (Lukas Hammerle, SWITCH)
- Operators who want to (inter)federate a service might find it useful to also enter an organization/service name instead of an entityID or domain name in order to find out whether an organisation is already federated and therefore might be able to access the service. (Lukas Hammerle, SWITCH) [comment, NH: this should already work via the search box. Would be good to get feedback on how effective it is].
- For SPs, it would be great if the contact info and the requested attributes from the AttributeConsumingService element could be displayed. (Lukas Hammerle, SWITCH)
- The search capalities should be extended to also cover searches for protocol (SAML1/SAML2/...), Interfederated (no, eduGAIN, Kalmar, ...), Code-of-Conduct (yes, no), Operated in a country that has an EU-like Dataprotection (yes,no). (Lukas Hammerle, SWITCH)
- support of SP key rollover in multiple federations. We've got a customer who has started the key rollover process in the UK federation, but this has caused problems in other federations when they started signing with a key that was only in our aggregate. So is it possible to compare metadata registrations that an entity has in different federations, specifically the embedded certificates and any use constraints? MET showed me which federations the SP is registered in (thanks!), but I still needed to hunt around for the other federations' metadata aggregate files. Reporting a link to the federations' aggregates, and the time that each metadata aggregate was queried by MET, would allow this function to be used in real-time to assist incident resolution. I've mocked up a page with the information that would prove useful to me (and I hope SP operators). It's at http://dlib-shandon.ucs.ed.ac.uk/2013-01-28-met-certificate-example.htm (Alex Stuart, UK Federation)
- Make the tables sortable by column heading. (Thomas Lenggenhager, SWITCHaai)
- The mock up of Alex is a good start. But instead of referring to the complete federation metadata in which an entity is registered, a link for each metadata source could popup the entity's metadata in a new window to easily copy-paste from or compare side by side. (Thomas Lenggenhager, SWITCHaai)
- Include a Federation count column in the 'most federated entities' summary. Provide a link through to a longer list of most federated entites. (Nicole)
- Enter some of the hub and spoke federations to see how they will be represented. (Miro).
- For each metadata element, link through to the standardisation documentation in the description field. (Miro)
- Research the possibility of Metadata validation (in conjunction with GEANT Federation Lab work and REEP).
- Provide features to create Service Catalogue information for Identity Providers and Service Providers.
- Crowdsourcing richer data sets around entities.