JISC

Context  

Shibboleth is an increasingly adopted technology for enabling an authorization scheme across multiple Universities and Internet publishers, based on SAML defined attribute requests and attribute responses. This technology can be adapted to web resources that need to be restricted according to attributes such as those commonly found in an Institution's student record system. 

There is a partial mapping between the existing capabilities of the technology and the requirement for intra- and inter-institutional attribute management in the context of widely-deployed virtual learning environments. 

Aims and Objectives  

The Guanxi project will extend functionality in two necessary areas: 

1. The use of a VLE to allow users to create and manage attributes. The Bodington VLE, which originated from the University of Leeds, will be integrated with Shibboleth and each of the partners will run one VLE capable of making attribute responses and attribute requests. 

2. The creation of a more advanced attribute authority which is able to integrate attributes from multiple and diverse data sources in an Institution. This work will be based on the Siva system which originates from the UHI Millennium Institute. 

Combining the two areas of work will allow an Institution to run a single attribute authority, based on Siva , which can form an attribute response by accessing multiple SQL databases, an LDAP directory and multiple VLE installations. The users of the VLEs will be able to manage membership of groups that will map onto attribute names in an institutional namespace. This will support a number of inter-organizational learning and teaching and research related on-line activities that are managed by users and are not currently well supported by Shibboleth. 

Project partners:

UHI Millennium Institute (lead partner) 
University of Leeds
University of Oxford