Joint Information Systems Committee 04/13/23 | | Slide 1

Federation Soup: Updates from the UK

Nicole HarrisJISC Executive

Joint Information Systems Committee 04/13/23 | slide 2

Status of membership – UK federation

603 members and counting

98% take-up in UK Higher Education (Universities)

– Institute of Cancer, Northern School of Contemporary Dance, Royal College of Nursing

63% take-up in Further Education (Community Colleges)

Increasing interest from schools sector (K-12)

Joint Information Systems Committee 04/13/23 | slide 3

Current Membership

Joint Information Systems Committee 04/13/23 | slide 4

What’s Different in the UK??

Drive related to commercial third-party SPs at the moment

Centralised license negotiation through JISC Collections

Legacy applications

Outsourced Identity Provision – Open Athens and Local Authority aggregation for K-12

Everyone joins as a member, can then register IdPs and SPs as required

– Technically, this means John Hopkins can have an IdP in the UK federation

Not just shib! Shibboleth approximately 59% of entity types

Membership is free

Growing interest in use for repositories, wikis, learning management systems etc.

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Resources

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NewsFilmOnline

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Nesli2 SMP (Small and Medium Publishers)

Negotiated licensing with smaller publishers on behalf of higher and further educations in the UK

Sits alongside negotiations with bigger players such as Elsevier

First round: Australian Academic Press, American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), Berg Publishing, Berkeley Electronic Press (Bepress), IOS Press (NL), Liverpool University Press, Multi-Science Publishing, SPIE, University of California Press.

MUST be UK federation compliant or will not broker deal

The biggest use case for interfederation…

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Next??

Improving the user experience at Service Providers (discovery problem, attribute release requirements, personalisation).

Managing (or not managing) internal applications through the UK federation. Another example of interfederation??

Working with the National Health Service (registering National Library for Health as an SP), complexity of multiple affiliations.

Repositories: importance of single author identifier.

User consent.

Identity Management within institutions.

Government / EU initiatives (low priority).

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Interfederation??

Currently focusing on agreement with InCommon:

– Technical interoperability, metadata interchange / trusted aggregator: http://www.iay.org.uk/blog/2008/10/metadata_interc.html

– Legal requirements – risk management! WILL require changes to core federation policy documents

• Opt-in for ‘mobile’ metadata with home federation

• Limiting liability for consumption of UK federation metadata through Incommon.

Use cases:

– UK services that have an international audience: JISCmail

– Nesli2 SMP resources: managing commercial resources

– Interfederation with campus federations in the UK???