Use Case:Professional Organizations and Federations

Requirement Breakdown

  1. A librarian at the college's main library agrees to proctor a survey on behalf of the American Library Association (ALA) of higher ed librarians.
  2. The survey seeks to gather information about successful and unsuccessful strategies for managing electronic periodical subscriptions.
  3. The survey is intended to target a specific audience - librarians within higher ed who are themselves members of the ALA.
  4. Membership in the ALA can only be authoritatively asserted by the ALA itself
    1. while affiliation with colleges and universities can only be authoritatively asserted by those colleges and universities.
  5. Fortunately, the ALA is party to an identity federation in which hundreds of higher ed institutions participate.
  6. The ALA sets up a web-based survey application using federated SSO services that allows librarians working at institutions within the federation to authenticate through their "home" organizations and gain access to the web application.
  7. The web application subsequently determines whether to grant them access to the survey itself based on the status of their membership in the ALA (as determined by direct inspection of the ALA's membership roster).

Actor

PAP

PDP

PEP

PIP

The ALA administers who gets access to the survey in the example

(tick)

 

 

 

The ALA's SP with the rule in the 'must be ALA member' cross references against local ePTID offered by the federation

 

(tick)

 

 

The ALA's SP again will enforce the rule (depending on philosophy of centralized or distributed will shift this point)

 

 

(tick)

 

The ALA local DB + Federation ePTID on record is the information store*

 

 

 

(tick)

Note that this model encourages the ALA actor to have people and their ePTID created in advance locally, but that would be expected behaviour since they are the association responsible for determination of membership.

Interestingly, this is a possible use of ORCID where the ORCID==ePTID and when on record locally would create a set of public identifiers to indicate membership.

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