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

[Tom Scavo <trscavo AT internet2.edu>]

On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 6:45 AM, Lukas Hämmerle
<lukas.haemmerle AT switch.ch> wrote:
>
> Last week I was at the e-Infrastructure for Earth Sciences workshop in
> Amsterdam [1] where one of the researchers mentioned that he finds it
> hard to see what services there are in eduGAIN and that he wished there
> was a human-readable SP list somewhere. I have heard similar requests
> from other potential eduGAIN users in the past.

Me too :-)

> Even though I usually tell them that in many cases just searching and
> using eduGAIN SPs won't work unless there is some kind of agreement
> between the SP and the user group

Did you tell him/her about the Research & Scholarship Category?

> On a general level regarding displaying SP information:
> I think what could very useful is - in contrast to write specific code
> to display additional entity information - to create an extensible
> JavaScript framework that takes SAML2 metadata as input and renders the
> complete contained information (names, contacts, logos, requested
> attributes, URLs) in a nice and easy to style way. Basically, SAMLMetaJS
> [2] but for *displaying* SAML2 metadata only. This potentially could
> save other similar SP listings (which there will always be) quite some
> work. Especially as it would be a generic (remember, it's only java
> script and css).
>
> What do others think about this idea? Do you think that could be useful
> and would be used?

Yes, I would absolutely use it :-) but let's back up one step. Before
we can start writing a JavaScript framework for SAML metadata, we need
to have the metadata in a format compatible with JavaScript, which of
course is JSON. So the basic problem boils down to a JSON schema for
SAML metadata, right?

Tom