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.
InCommon has added a number of new features to its dynamic web pages that provide information about all of the services available throughout the InCommon Federation. We hope this increases the value of federation for:
- Sponsored Partners, by showing more information about the services you provide.
- users of services, by enabling you to find new federated services.
This version of the Federation Info Pages includes some new pages:
- a list of all organizations published in Federation metadata
- for each organization, a list of IdPs and SPs that that organization has deployed
The above pages are in addition to existing Federation Info Pages:
- lists of all identity providers and services providers deployed in the Federation
- individual pages for each that include:
- the organization’s logo
- names and descriptions of services
- links for information and privacy statements
- contact information
- for service providers, a list of requested attributes.
All of the pages – new and existing – have also been enhanced to include:
- exclusive use of modal dialogues (instead of popping up new windows)
- better error handling and reporting (using modal dialogues)
- a consistent look-and-feel across all pages
- better browser caching (and therefore faster load times)
- more technical information per entity on demand
You can access all of these pages by visiting https://incommon.org/federation/info/
If you find missing information for your organization or service, contact your local site administrator to add the appropriate elements to your metadata. In particular, you’ll see a number of service providers listed under “other.” Your administrator can fix that simply by providing a display name in metadata.
You can also visit our FAQ (https://spaces.at.internet2.edu/x/5IOVAQ) for more information.