Shibboleth Developers

[Peter Murray <>]

My apologies for what might have seemed like an unexpected intrusion in 
the shib-dev conference call yesterday afternoon.  After subscribing to 
the mailing list and reading the archives, I had intended to merely 
lurk on the conference call but as comments came up I may have caused 
the group to rehash issues that had been decided.

My immediate interest in the Shibboleth project comes from 
participation in the NISO Metasearch Initiative (NISO-MSI -- 
<http://www.niso.org/committees/MS_initiative.html>) Task Group 1 on 
Access Management 
(<http://www.niso.org/committees/MS-task_groups.html#1>).  Libraries 
are building "metasearch engines" that enable users to conduct a search 
across a wide variety of databases and other systems.  NISO created the 
initiative to deal with the problems that the early, ad-hoc adoption of 
these tools has caused:  how engines can discover what resources are 
available (task group #2), search them in ways that don't rely on, at 
worse, HTML-scraping tools (task group #3) and do so in such a way to 
ensure the proper rights and permissions are used (task group #1).

These task groups are just now getting started, and one of the first 
things TG1 is doing is constructing a taxonomy of terms in access 
management so we can all be sure we are talking about the same thing. 
The use of the term "origin", in fact, points to the difficulties.  In 
the RFC for "Internet Web Replication and Caching Taxonomy" 
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3040.txt> the word 'origin' refers to 
that which holds the resource.  As you know, libraries have been making 
do with proxies for a long time, so Shibboleth's use of the word 
'origin' to mean the home institution of the user could be a source of 
confusion.

As an aside, I have not found a concise source for terminology usage in 
the Shibboleth documentation, but in the conference call I believe 
someone said Nate was working on such a document.  On behalf of the 
NISO-MSI, I'd be happy to help out as it will benefit some mutual 
interests.

During the North East Regional Computing Program (NERCOMP) annual 
conference last month, Phyllis Shuey from Penn State described their 
work with Shibboleth and included a discussion of "coming attractions" 
with the LionShare project.  There is a striking similarity between the 
what is proposed there and what could be used in a metasearch 
environment.  For the sake of simplifying discussion threads, I'll 
include that in a different message.


Peter
--
Peter Murray                      http://www.pandc.org/peter/work/
Assistant to the Director for Technology Initiatives  860-486-6771
University of Connecticut Libraries            Storrs, Connecticut