REFEDS publishes standards and specifications used by the global research and education community. Together, these standards enable scalable, secure, and seamless federated access. As our community grows and matures, these specifications have continued to evolve through community volunteer working groups.
These specifications have defined varying ways to signal support and conformance. Some rely on signals embedded in metadata, while others define signals used at user sign-in time. During the last round of REFEDS specification updates, the working groups received feedback that all specifications should have metadata signaling components to facilitate a better user experience and to streamline integration configuration.
The Framework Registration Working Group aims to tackle that need: to identify a standard mechanism to be used by all REFEEDS specifications to define, record, and publish conformance and support signals in metadata.
The group began meeting weekly in March and has so far identified the following:
- We are limiting the scope to REFEDS-registered specifications only
- The mechanism itself should be protocol-neutral. While the group will produce a SAML metadata profile, very likely reusing existing mechanisms, the core framework should not assume SAML.
We are currently reviewing commonly used REFEDS-adjacent specifications to better understand next steps. We’d love for you to join us. The group meets Mondays weekly at 16.00 – 17.00 CET | 10 – 11 AM ET | 7 – 8 AM PT.
Albert Wu
Chair of the Framework Registration Working Group