The FIM4D Working Group received funding in the context of the Working Group Funding Scheme 2017/2018 to organise a workshop which would help service providers make their resources and services available to the users of DARIAH throughout Europe via the DARIAH AAI. The aim of the workshop was to teach in practice how to install the open-source Shibboleth Service Provider (SP) software needed to integrate services into the research infrastructure. In the end, two hands-on workshops were organised, in collaboration with DARIAH-DE, on the DARIAH Authentication and Authorization Infrastructure (AAI) in January and May 2019.
Workshops
The first workshop was held in January at the DARIAH-DE partner, DAASI International, in Tübingen, Germany, and the other workshop was organised in the periphery of the DARIAH Annual Event in May, in Warsaw, Poland. The goal of both workshops was to integrate new DARIAH online services in the DARIAH AAI, which connects with research institutions around the globe that either participate in eduGAIN or use a dedicated DARIAH account.
The participants, who came from France, Germany, and Luxembourg, learned about the well-established Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) Standard, about the open-source Shibboleth implementation, and the open-source SATOSA software that connects the SAML world to other technologies like OpenID Connect, which are in use by various social identity providers.
The participants had been asked to bring their own digital humanities online service. In this way, these services would be then attached to the AAI. Participants learned how to successfully set up a Shibboleth Service Provider and connect it to their application. The SP connects the application with the Next Generation DARIAH AAI SAML-based proxy server, which is part of eduGAIN. Thus the goal was to “shibbolize” their application, so that more services would be AAI-ready.
Outcomes
The participants learned new technologies and interconnected for future collaborations with DARIAH and the Working Group. On the other hand, the community received or will be receiving new services in the near future, such as DDRS or some prospective services at OpenEdition. Finally, the impact of such workshops is that they raise awareness of the DARIAH infrastructure and, in this case, of the GEANT eduGAIN higher education federation.
This post is part of the Working Groups Stories series presenting results and outcomes from the Working Group Funding Scheme 2017-2018.
