Problem Statement
Nearly every online activity is supported by one or more aspects of Identity and Access Management (IAM). This is perhaps especially true in the domains of teaching, learning and research. Since these IAM services are so ubiquitous, it would be best if service developers followed consistent patterns in how they are to be invoked and used. Over the last fourteen years the higher education community has produced an impressive collection of open source components for various identity and access management capabilities. Recently, the community has taken on the challenge of bringing these components together, developing new components to address gaps in coverage and packaging these components into a complementary set of easily installable and configurable services. Consistent, well defined and documented APIs will be critical to the broad adoption of such loosely coupled, but readily integratable IAM services.
The Data Structures and APIs Working Group (WG) has been asked to spell out an overarching conceptual model for IAM interfaces and information objects. To be more than shelf-ware, such a model must be expressed as a set of design principles and conventions such that the resulting data structures and services will form a coherent and comprehensive whole. Leaving this task undone would certainly lead to increased complexity and needless inconsistencies as each IAM component developer team would likely come up with variant solutions to what is actually a common set of API design problems. As an outcome, campuses would find it more difficult to adopt the resulting services and the education and research community would find it more challenging to maintain, support and evolve the IAM services code base and documentation.
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- Ongoing assistance
- Funding to offset time and work being done by external subject matter experts.
- Propose and send out agendas and meeting reminders
Arrange for TIER developers, QA people, and others to allocate some of their time to working together with this WG as specified under "Tasks" above
- Support the publication, promotion, discoverability and persistence of appropriate WG documents
See Also
TIER Data Structures and APIs Working Group Home
TIER Entity Registry Working Group
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