Shibboleth Developers

["RL 'Bob' Morgan" <>]

On Mon, 14 Nov 2005, Lukas Haemmerle wrote:

> In order to provide our end-users with a central directory of all 
> available Service Providers and for other things of our federation, we 
> are thinking of creating an XML file (using the data of our Resource 
> Registry) that describes our federation in a complementary way than the 
> federation metadata and individual XML files.

Let me add to Scott's note and say that it is the intent of the current 
metadata format to cover everything a site, hence a federation, would need 
to know about other sites; and further that the elements be reflected in 
the generic SAML standard as much as possible.  Creating per-site or 
per-federation unique elements will make the life of SPs that have to live 
in multiple federations much more difficult.  So by all means metadata 
requirements are very important and should be brought forward, but we 
suggest that standardizing within the current format is the right approach 
rather than creating a different one.  This is also important for a likely 
future where sites self-publish their site metadata rather than relying on 
a federation to aggregate.

 - RL "Bob"