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

[Nicole Harris <harris AT terena.org>]

Hi Martin

REFEDS has offered to tackle the entity category and schema issues as
these are wider than edugain and the edugain folk have offered to talk
to CLARIN (in multiple countries) to cover use cases in place - many
thanks for the license use case.  I agree that there a wide and very
different opinions on how to tackle the problem but we do have processes
in place in REFEDS for shepherding opinion clashes.

We have a shared meeting in Vienna today, so it will be a good
opportunity for various people to put these actions in place.

Many thanks

Nicole

On 02/12/2014 09:07, Martin Matthiesen wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'd like to sum up this discussion, I guess we have exhausted the 
> usefulness of email here. So I shall stay silent after this unless asked 
> directly.
>
> Jozef originally asked how to differentiate academic and non-academic IdPs. 
> The idea of an entity catergory came up. Someone asked for a concrete use 
> case and I presented the case of Clarin ACA 
> (http://www.clarin.eu/content/license-categories). Currently in use at 
> korp.csc.fi, where eduPersonAffiliation == faculty grants ACA access to a 
> newspaper text corpus (HS.fi).
>
> It has been known that EPA is not harmonised (Cormack & Linden: [1]). It 
> seems the use of eduPerson* is also not restricted to academic 
> institutions. Harmonised semantics have been requested for a long time, 
> consider FIM4R (Kelsey 2012: [2], Kelsey 2013: [3], Wartel 2014).
>
> Suggestions made, whether daring (harmonise!) or pragmatic (I make 
> mappings) were met with he general sentiment: touching this is difficult, 
> let's not touch the existing, let's make new definitions on top of the 
> existing.
>
> I'd like to conclude with a metaphor: You built a road without defining on 
> what side the cars should drive. Now this needs to be defined and you say: 
> prefer the right to the left, you will probably be fine, in most cases. But 
> don't quote us on that, if you have an accident, it's your own fault. The 
> result will likely be that your road will not be used very much. I would 
> like to see some leadership here. Who, if not you, eduGAIN, can actually 
> bring about changes in this area?
>
> Martin
>
> P.S.: Sweden actually did change the side of the road in the 60s (even 
> against a popular vote), some wise folks foresaw that it would be much 
> harder with every year they waited. They did discuss it for 40 years, 
> though [5].
>
>
> [1] http://www.terena.org/activities/refeds/docs/ePSAcomparison_0_13.pdf
>
> [2] http://www.terena.org/activities/vamp/ws1/slides/0609-kelsey-fim4r.pdf
> [3] http://www.redclara.net/news/DV/DVFD/Presentaciones/David_Kelsey.pdf
> [4] 
> https://rd-alliance.org/sites/default/files/Romain%20Wartel%202014-09-24%20RDA.pdf
>
> [5] http://www.volvoclub.org.uk/history/driving_on_right.shtml
>


-- 
Nicole Harris
Project Development Officer
GÉANT Association Amsterdam Office (formerly TERENA)
Singel 468 D, 1017 AW Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Skype: harrisnv
M:+31 64 610 53 95