The Netherlands – SURFconext
Overall Scope
Key Information
Runs from: Jan. 2010 – Jan. 2011 (12 months)
Website(s): http://www.surfnet.nl/en/Thema/coin
Summary
Currently, the market offers a great variety of online applications. The number of available online applications increases at a fast pace, they evolve quickly and tend to become more complex and specialized. At the same time users become more demanding and want to choose, mix and match tools from different vendors that best fit their online collaboration needs. The downside of this multi vendor approach is that users need to authenticate for each tool separately and that there is a lack of interoperability.
To simplify identity management and to improve the interoperability of online applications, SURFnet and partners in higher education and research created a next generation collaboration infrastructure entitled SURFconext. The use of open standards like OpenSocial and SAML play a central role in SURFconext. SURFconext is a synergy of identity management, social networking and collaboration applications.
Objectives
1) provide a next generation collaboration infrastructure to better facilitate online collaboration and to create new opportunities for multidisciplinary collaboration efforts in education and research both national and international.
2) interlink (new/innovative) services from different providers and to offer these services via the SURFconext infrastructure.
3) enhance the adoption of open standards in online collaboration (see the chapter on technology), to minimize vendor lock-in and to increase reuse of middleware components.
Highlights
The unique selling point of SURFconext is the availability of a rich set of collaboration services from which our users (e.g. students, researchers an teachers) can choose to fulfil their online collaboration needs. SURFconext will remove the thresholds for online collaboration and creates new opportunities for collaboration between multidisciplinary teams.
A unique feature in SURFconext is SURFteams. SURFteams is a supporting service for the administration of group relationships. Multiple collaboration services can use the SURFteams database to determine which users are authorized to access resources. This way, the membership roster remains consistent across applications and context awareness can be created.
SURFconext is designed for reuse, minimises vendor-lock-in by interconnecting products from different vendors and it pushes open standards. The open standards SAML (security assertion markup language for identity management) and OpenSocial (as a generic integration standard and specification) play a central role in this project. Both standards have already been adopted by the international community and have a substantial user base. As such SAML and OpenSocial hold great promise for interconnecting researchers, educators and students.
Pilot studies have been implemented with products from several vendors like Alfresco, Liferay, Atlassian and Cisco. Even not for profit initiatives and collaboration services are involved, like Sakai (in partnership with the University of Amsterdam), MyExperiment, Foodle, Filesender and Etherpad. In the end, SURFconext will accelerate the development of social features in eReseach and eEducation applications, reduce the digital divide.
R&D Scope
One of the primary aims of SURFconext is to stimulate the use of open standards. Standards that are used in SURFconext are SAML and OpenSocial:
SAML
SAML is an XML-based standard for exchanging authentication and authorization data between security domains, that is, between an identity provider (a producer of assertions) and a service provider (a consumer of assertions). The single most important problem that SAML is trying to solve is the Web Browser Single Sign-On (SSO) problem. SAML and its implementation in the SURFnet service SURFfederatie is an important requirement for online collaboration in SURFconext. The use of the SAML standard in SURFconext enables users in education and research to access a rich and still growing set of applications with their own institutional account.
OpenSocial
Research and education are inherently social activities and therefore require standards that facilitate social networking. OpenSocial helps software providers to better model relationships between people by providing social APIs for the exchange of profile, friend, group and activity data. In addition, OpenSocial provides a gadget architecture. Gadgets are small, pluggable “mini-applications” that are easy to install in any Web page and reusable in any OpenSocial environment. A well-known instance of OpenSocial is iGoogle. SURFconext provides an iGoogle like portal but in contrast to iGoogle it provides additional features like single sign on and group context awareness all in a safe oAuth enabled `environment.
The standards above have been implemented in 2010. Other standards and protocols will be explored in 2011. For example, SURFnet will investigate the suitability of data exchange standards like CMIS – Content Management Interoperability Services -, IMS/LTI – a standard to improve interoperability between learning tools – and XMPP an open technology for real-time communication (e.g. video calls, chat and instant messaging).
Expected Impact
By facilitating online collaboration in the field of education and research, SURFconext ensures that researchers, teachers, and students can collaborate online in a simple and very effective way. By using the internet, collaboration is possible across institutional and country boundaries. Having a healthy research and education industry, is a significant requirement for a competitive knowledge economy.
By using open standards and by open sourcing of our products, universal usability and reuse of the SURFconext infrastructure will be guaranteed.
Involved Constituency
The success of SURFconext depends on the adoption of this technology and architecture by institutions (universities/research), virtual organizations (e.g. CLARIN and LIFEWATCH) and service providers. That is why SURFnet institutions have been involved in this project from the very beginning. With other words, SURFconext has been developed by and for higher education and research. Partnerships have been established with national and international Research and Education Networks (NRENs) like Uninett in Norway, Internet2 (US) and Terena (EU). These NRENs provided reusable components and gave feedback on the SURFconext architecture. In addition, SURFnet actively participates in the OpenSocial foundation. SURFnet and the OpenSocial Foundation organized the first OpenSocial event in Europe.
