Page History

Project Summary

InCommon, with a membership base of over 150 180 higher educational institutions representing over 4 5 million end users is the clear choice for identity federation for the U.S higher educational community. This opinion was stated last February by the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC) in conjunction with the EDUCAUSE Campus Cyberinfrastructure working group, and was recently echoed by the NSF ACCI Campus Bridging Task Force. Recent advances by the NSF TeraGrid project have demonstrated InCommon provides a basis for identity federation not only between higher educational institutions, but also between those institutions and NSF cyberinfrastructure.

We propose to build on these endorsements of InCommon and technical advances in its use by authoring a unique "InCommon Roadmap for NSF CyberInfrastructure", which will provide guidance for NSF cyberinfrastructure projects, researchers and their representative campuses on the successful adoption and use of InCommon to advance NSF science and engineering research. Focused on NSF science and engineering, our Roadmap will provide concrete guidance to campuses and cyberinfrastructure projects for utilizing InCommon to allow research to effectively take advantage of federated identity as a foundation for a national cyberinfrastructure. The Roadmap will empower campuses and communities with the necessary motivations and information they need to successfully leverage InCommon to integrate their cyberinfrastructure NSF science and engineering cyberinfrastructure framework.

InCommon along with an assembled collection of experts serving as a editorial board have agreed to serve as a review body for our Roadmap. Our metric of success is the approval of the document by the ACCI Campus Bridging Task Force and subsequent distribution with their endorsement.

Intellectual Merit: Authoring such a roadmap involves clearly documenting how to overcome technical, policy and social challenges for both NSF CI and campuses. This expertise is broader than any one individual. Our proposal team brings together a combination of NSF cyberinfrastructure experts and campus identity management experts uniquely qualified to address these challenges on both sides of the identity federation bridge between campuses and NSF cyberinfrastructure.

Broader Impact: Our proposed Roadmap would be a unique and valuable contribution to the NSF and InCommon communities. It will serve to help coalesce community consensus in InCommon and federated identity, motivating greater adoption of InCommon and increase its use by campuses, cyberinfrastructure projects and their user communities. This in turn will lead to a solid foundation for NSF's vision of a Cyberinfrastructure Framework for 21st Century Science and Engineering.

Principal Investigator

William Barnett
Indiana University
Senior Manager, Life Sciences, Research Technologies
Associate Director, Pervasive Technology Institute
Director, IT Advanced Core, IU School of Medicine
Director, Information Architectures, Indiana CTSI

Other Principals

Craig Stewart, Indiana University
Alan Walsh, Indiana University
Von Welch, Independent Consultant

Editorial Board

James Basney, NCSA
Michael Beyerlein, Purdue University
Ken Klingenstein, Internet2
Michael McLennan, Purdue University

Project Documents