An open discussion list for topics related to the eduGAIN interfederation service.

[Peter Schober <peter.schober AT univie.ac.at>]

* Ian Young <ian AT iay.org.uk> [2014-07-07 11:47]:
> The problem is that many SPs -- even commercial SPs -- cut corners
> when designing their discovery interface and just list everything,
> rather than for example just their customers.

While that's certainly the case (and I fully agree that his is the
source of the problem) I suspect that some of those SPs that are
member of the UKfederation are simply not aware that this now means
"something else" to some degree (i.e., there are now non-UKf entities
in what thought was the UKf metadata feed). Which is why every IDP
within eduGAIN now pops up in their (or the UKf's central, or
TERENA's) discovery interface as being part of the "UK Federation".
The assumption that this only holds UKf entities simply doesn't hold
anymore.

Which is also why we've been careful so far in recommomending use of
our interfedation-enabled feed to SPs. (IDPs on the other hand should
always consume our interfederation-enabled feed, so for opting in IDPs
all it takes is sending us an email to that regard, plus the mostly
non-technical, i.e., impossibly hard, part of getting scalable
attribute release policies signed off by management.)

We also have a seperate metadata feed to deal with the "duplicte IDP"
case at some SPs that was mentioned, namely those SPs who have joined
our federation (probably earlier) as well as participate in
eduGAIN. In that case they'll see all our IDPs twice that participate
in eduGAIN. We don't want to remove them from the local federation
aggregate yet (so as not to take away services which are properly
registered as federation members, making federation membership less
attractive for not-yet-eduGAINers).  That specual feed which we give
to those SPs then contains only those entities registered in our
federation which are /not/ yet participating in eduGAIN.

So we're dealing with those cases by producing more and more
specialized metadata aggreates, to prevent some of the issues that
would otherwise exist.

And while bleeding edge'ers like the UKf (being exposed here mostly
because of their very large number of e-resource/library SPs) might
see us as perpetuating the problem of not-yet-interfederated entities
(which might be true) it causes much less confusion and unintended
side-effects at this point in time.

But, again, all of this is just an IDP disco problem, not a metadata
or eduGAIN problem. (I just chose to deal with some of those disco
problems via specialized metadata feeds -- workarounds or hacks, if
you will -- because these are the tools I have available now.)
We still want metadata to flow everywhere and effort would better be
spent helping those running less than ideal discovery interfaces.
-peter

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