JISC

Current situation

Athens

JISC currently funds Eduserv to run the Athens system as a national access management solution for UK HE and FE. The Athens service has been a great success in signing up both institutions and resource providers in order to provide a quality service for the community. It is important to now evaluate the position of Athens and proactively engage in new development and solutions in order to meet the full requirements of the community. 

The current Athens technology does not meet all the emerging access management needs of the community. Specific areas that need to be addressed are:

• Use of centralised databases of information Whilst well supported for access to third party materials, such an approach is insufficient to manage access to internal resources as the dependence on external databases forms too much of a risk for the availability of internal institutional services.
• Athens is a proprietary system and has limited international take-up  The use of a proprietary system ‘locks in’ both institutions and resource providers to use of this system, restricting both choice and potential for join-up with other developments. 
• New requirements Athens lacks the flexibility to address all of the recent requirements of the community, particularly in terms of inter- and intra-institutional work and collaborative working. 

When considering the advancement of next generation access management technology it is important to separate out the technology used within the Athens system, and the comprehensive and extensive service offered by Athens to support this system. At a technological level, Shibboleth can only be compared to the technology, and does not offer the service capability currently enjoyed by the Further and Higher Education community. 

AAA programme

JISC funded the AAA (Authentication, Authorisation and Accounting) Programme from July 2002 – July 2005 in order to start scoping both the needs of the community and to assess the current state-of-the-art worldwide.  This programme can in essence be seen as a technical, political, cultural and environmental audit of the key middleware technologies and the UK HE and FE community in order to inform future development.  The findings will be of primary importance to the Core Middleware Programmes, and the programme itself was essential in informing JISC’s decision to back the Shibboleth system for development and implementation within the UK. 

Shared Services programme

The vision of ‘Shared Services’ for the UK HE and HE community was born out of development within the Information Environment.  A set of common infrastructure services have been identified which provide machine-to-machine (m2m) interfaces suitable for being interrogated by other components in the JISC IE architecture. Over the past few years, projects are being funded under the Shared Services Programme to implement the Shared Services development plan and to explore and trail some of the identified services. 

The purpose of the programme was to scope and trial certain services on a small scale, whilst evaluating their impact and future role as centralised services. It also looked to answer some very specific questions about this type of (often more domain-specific) middleware, such as whether it is appropriate to offer these services at a national level, or would localised, regional or institutional solutions be more appropriate? JISC will continue selectively funding studies and pilots which if pursued will lead in due course to production services. However, the Shared Services are to be considered in a broader context, to inter-relate the technology aspects of learning, teaching and research. Together with the Core Middleware Programmes and other middleware initiatives, the Shared Services form a part a common middleware scheme to support the widest possible range of institutional activities.

Other middleware development and liaison work

JISC has been contributing to the development of Shibboleth for some time, particularly by participating in the Internet2 work. As such, it has been ideally positioned to both monitor and participate in developments worldwide. The development team continues to maintain a dialogue and discuss working plans with several countries and organisations as they consider and monitor Shibboleth. This includes effort within the US (NMI-EDIT), the Netherlands (SURF), Switzerland (SWITCH) and Australia (DEST).

Due to the very nature of middleware, and its increasing importance within the education sector, many other JISC programmes have investigated and implemented (specific) middleware solutions.  Valuable contributions have been made by these programmes, particularly in terms of institutional middleware tools.  In order to obtain a clear overview and understand the total impact of middleware development within JISC, it will be important to carry out an audit across all development projects.