Posted by techczech on July 8, 2010 at 11:43pm
I'd like to get some feedback on a few ideas for federating identity in the research and education spheres and Drupal's role in it. On the surface, Drupal should be the ideal platform with RDF and OpenID in core but I haven't seen the notion of federation discussed much. I think this could be of interest to the curriculum and training community who often have to deal with the consequences of silos.
Here's my outline of how I think the education and academic communities could benefit from federation http://researchity.net/2010/07/08/federated-academic-identity.
Comments
InCommon
I know this isn't exactly what you are aiming at, since it sounds more like you are trying to revamp and setup your own federation standard, but just in case you haven't heard of InCommon Federation yet, they are gaining a lot of traction in the academic arena:
http://www.incommonfederation.org/
They are less focused on community building and more focused on just allowing one institution to confirm that someone is an active member of another institution that they may/may not have a trust relationship with. In fact they are pretty proud of the fact that it can all be done in a completely opaque manner, with no personally identifiable information shared. Access decisions to College X's online library materials for a student in College Y seems to be a favorite example use-case cited.
We looked at integrating InCommon into our application, mainly for the SSO merits, but ended up going with CAS since it was significantly easier to configure than Shibboleth (which InCommon runs on) and still more widely adopted in academia. Be that as it may, the concept of federated identity is still pretty intriguing to me. Make sure to keep the group informed if you move forward with this any further.