To find information about federations requires that you go to each and every one of the federations you’re interested in and manually gather the information or go to a service that has done this manually, e.g., REFEDS Metadata Explorer Tool (MET) or eduGAIN technical site, and look for what is manually registered there. To minimize the work to maintain and publish this information, the working group REFEDS Metadata about Identity Federations will define a set of federation information metadata that includes links to information and policy plus contact information. Standardizing this metadata is part of supporting and facilitating the REFEDS Identity Federation Baseline Expectations for Federation Operators.
The working group started earlier this year and has started its initial work with an open discussion on what information may be present in the metadata about a federation. We’ve looked into what information the MET and eduGAIN tools collect today and what information can be interesting in other use cases. Another question that will be discussed is whether the specification will be protocol agnostic or written specifically for one or more identity federation technologies.
How will the metadata about a federation will be published? We don’t know yet, but it’s important that we don’t break any current identity federation software by adding new metadata to current federation metadata feeds. Therefore, we will look into a standalone publication of the metadata about the federation.
We will continue these discussions until the work is published for the standard REFEDS consultation. If you want to participate in these discussions, please reach out to the working group. The working group wiki page is at https://wiki.refeds.org/display/GROUPS/Metadata+about+Federations+Working+Group.
Pål Axelsson
Chair of the working group