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

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

* Niels van Dijk <niels.vandijk AT surfnet.nl> [2019-05-09 12:18]:
> Would it be useful to have federation make known which entity
> categories they support in some automated fashion (other then by
> filling in the REFEDs wiki yearly)?

If federations prevent use of some entity categories due to
limitations in their tooling (something I've heard in the past) I
guess asking them to add other stuff to their tooling that expresses
whether they support ECs or not is unlikely to yield results. ;)

So I'd suggest to simply ask all representatives in the eduGAIN
Steering Group and task the OT to make notes of that in the eduGAIN
database somewhere. (You're writing to eduGAIN-discuss so I guess this
is an eduGAIN-specific question. As such the REFEDS survey doesn't
factor into this, I think. Also it seems a unlikely a federation
starts supporting categories and removes that support again later, so
redoing that excersise regularly does not seem warranted to me.)

If you wanted to centralise some of that work (i.e., spare the
federations that obviouly support those ECs as can be seen from their
metadata) -- at the cost of making someone else go through all that
metadata -- that would (by exclusion of supporting federations) result
in a list of of those federations where the status is unclear.
Then only those federations would be asked to provide a reply on
whether they support it and *why* *not*.

Learning about the reasons why a federation does not support a given
(or any) category seems more helpful than merely knowing whether they
do -- then we could at least start a discussion what could be done to
help them start supporting it.

-peter