Shibboleth Developers

["RL 'Bob' Morgan" <>]

On Mon, 29 Sep 2003 

 wrote:

> (from JSTOR)
> 
> "meta-searching":
> 
>     1. User contacts a "meta-search engine," presumably running on a
>        server at his/her institution (although maybe not, maybe it's
>        running on some consolidator's server -- auth gets more
>        interesting in that case.)
>     2. This engine submits searches to a number of online resources, of
>        which JSTOR is one, using some mechanism (currently, to search
>        JSTOR, the engine has to "scrape" the HTML, but we're in
>        discussion about implementing an XML-based interface).
>     3. The search results are then consolidated and presented back to the
>        user.

Adding to this, based on discussions with David Y at JSTOR:  regardless of 
whether the connection between the MSE and JSTOR is traditional (ie, MSE 
acting as browser, scraping HTML) or forward-looking (presumably 
Web-Services-style, ie defined methods returning XML objects), JSTOR would 
like to base its access control on user attributes in just the same way as 
if the user were accessing JSTOR directly with a browser.  As we've 
discussed, this could be done either by the MSE obtaining user attributes 
and passing them along to JSTOR, or by the MSE passing to JSTOR something 
handle-like that JSTOR could use to fetch user attributes itself.

One consideration is that there is apparently enough interest in this
scenario in the library community that there will be consideration of
standards (NISO was the organization mentioned) for it; so the question
for us is the appropriate role of Shib/SAML/attributes/etc in such a
standard.

 - RL "Bob"


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