This activity attempts to provide a pilot for an eduGAIN service catalogue and extend it according to the needs of the community.

The aim of this activity is to provide a pilot service based on existing requirements and to analyse the demand and use cases of an eduGAIN service catalogue.

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.

Various discussions in recent years have shown that there is a need for a service catalogue, at least on the part of GÉANT Operations. The activity attempts also to identify benefits for federations and institutes.

• There is a chance that not enough federation operators will contribute and that the service catalogue cannot be meaningfully filled.

• When selecting the tool, security and privacy are important requirements

• Potential software 

This activity yields two possible outcomes:

• If the trial period is successful, options for sustaining the service will be explored in collaboration with T&I Operations.
• If the trial phase is not successful, only the lessons learned are documented and made publicly available.

The project has reached a point where engagement from the community is required to take the work forward.

At this time we have received no offers of engagement and we are therefore stopping our work, leaving documentation and existing code available to any group who may wish to continue developing the Service Catalogue.

• Technical prototype: https://surfnet-niels.github.io
• Demo video: https://wiki.geant.org/download/attachments/247431187/SC_demo.mp4