Digital Directions: AIM – new projects February 17, 2012
Posted by chriscb in : AIM, Projects , add a commentAlthough the AIM programme officially ran from January 2009 to March 2011, projects have continued to be funded under this programme. Following a bit of a restructuring of programmes and strands within the Digital Infrastructure team, the AIM programme is now included within the Digital Infrastructure Directions programme and details are available on the programme’s new webpage.
If you saw the “JISC Grant funding 16/11: JISC Digital infrastructure programme” call late last year, you will know that it included an AIM strand. This strand was looking to fund projects that embedded AIM outputs and helped to build communities around these tools. From this call we have funded the following 4 projects, all of which started on 1 February:
CONSENT (Communities On NGS via SARoNGS ENabled Trust)
The SARoNGS project was originally funded under the e-Infrastructure Programme to deliver into production a Shibboleth based infrastructure for the NGS, to enable HEI users/researchers to access NGS resources using their institutional identities as provided through membership of the Access Management Federation. The CONSENT project expands this service to meet the needs and peculiarities of the numerous established and emergent large-scale research communities, starting with NSCCS as an exemplar and providing facilities for further communities and domains. They will produce an Identity Portal component to the SARoNGS service exploring the AIM requirements of the user communities to aid their access to resources in the familiar Single Sign On / Federated ID environment.
RAPID (RAPtor Informing Decisions)
The RAPID project will identify and document use cases for producing management level information from composite log analysis by installing and integrating Raptor (a previously funded AIM project) with existing web applications (e.g. Shibboleth, Grouper, EZProxy) at Newcastle University. You can follow their Twitter feed and see their great logo here. We’re hoping to fund more work around Raptor this year and the evaluation of Raptor is a strand within the latest Digital Infrastructure call – JISC Grant Funding 01/12: Digital Infrastructure Programme.
SMART Deployment: Student-Managed Access to Online Resources Deployment
Another project funded under the original AIM programme was the SMART project, which developed an online data access management system based on the User-Managed Access (UMA) Web protocol. Through this work they will make existing state-of-the-art access management software more usable by extending it with federated identity management functionality. They will embed this software within Newcastle and integrate it with the UK federation to provide the community within the UK with better generic tools to share data across organisational boundaries. The SMART team are heavily involved with the Kantara Initiative’s UMA Working Group. If you want to follow the latest developments with UMA you can follow, and get involved with, their monthly UMA tweet chats (#umachat).
Supporting Institutional Access to External Services
The Supporting Institutional Access to External Services project will use the BOS (Bristol Online Surveys) service to provide a case study of a large scaled national service adopting Shibboleth to allow institutional users to manage groups within their own accounts. They will work with Cardiff and Durham Universities to identify policy issues which need to be addressed to provide flexible group management administration and provide guidelines and example contracts on Shibboleth access to shared services for non-technical staff.
All of these projects started on 1 February and, apart from the CONSENT project which runs until 31 May 2012, run until 31 July 2012.