The eduGAIN Support Team, Secretariat and business development received several requests from SPs, IdPs and NRENs for an eduGAIN Service Catalogue. Currently the eduGAIN Entities Database tool and REFEDS Metadata Explorer Tool (MET) are the two services closest to a service catalogue, but there are inconsistencies between the two tools. Within the scope of this activity, a market analysis will be carried out to select a suitable tool for an eduGAIN service catalogue. The existing requirements that have been identified in recent years will be used. The selected tool will be deployed in a test environment and made available to the community in a pilot phase. The Incubator will promote the tool with the help of GÉANT MARCOMMS and the Enabling Communities task. Participants will be actively asked for feedback, potential use cases and ideas for improvement. At the same time, the project aims to explicitly identify use cases that give NRENS and institutes an advantage when using the service catalogue. The Incubator attempts to improve the solution based on the outcome of this pilot phase. Depending on the requirements and use cases that need to be supported, new features can be added in following an iterative process. If there are not enough participants to provide a meaningful amount of data, no additional developments will be carried out by the Incubator. In this case, the software is decommissioned at the end of the pilot phase and the project is terminated. Basic research on this topic has already been carried out in the past. In September 2017 a REFEDS Working Group published a paper on this matter. This paper describes examples of service catalogues, technical requirement and best practices, and challenges. Creating an eduGAIN Service Catalogue can be based on the Entities Database and MET. These findings can be taken into account in the activity. |