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Introduction

The Consortium composed of the following four partners:

  • Trans European Research and Education Networking Association, hereafter called TERENA, the leading partner;
  • Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche - Association of European Research Libraries, hereafter called LIBER;
  • Universiteit van Amsterdam hereafter called UvA;
  • University and National Library of Debrecen hereafter called DEENK

has been awarded by the European Commission the grant to do a study on “AAA (authentication, authorization and accounting) platforms and services for scientific data/information resources”.

Aim of the Study

Supporting and promoting scientific research and innovation as well as opening up enabling access to scientific information are key priorities for the European Commission and for the Member States.

The rapid development and adoption of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have enabled the provisioning of e-Infrastructures, a distributed environment to share resources (hardware, software and content) and access them wherever required for research purposes; this has changed the way researchers work, enabling almost instantaneous collaboration regardless of physical location and has provided access to an enormous amount of scientific information that can be processed on powerful computational platforms.

Research addresses different aspects and as a result the data produced is very heterogeneous, so is the demand to access, store, protect and preserve them. A platform able to handle different levels of access to heterogeneous content is referred to as the Scientific Data e-Infrastructure (SDI).

The goal of the SDI is to ensure access to different types of content and to allow for flexible, reliable, efficient, cross-disciplinary and cross-border access; at the same time it is important to protect data integrity and ownership and ensure data authenticity as well as data confidentiality. It is also important to ensure that data access is available to everybody, in light of open exchange of knowledge that has been and remains one of the main drivers for research.  

The goal above presents at the same time opportunities and challenges, mostly related to data access, data management and governance, data curation and long-term preservation.

The SDI requires sophisticated mechanisms for authentication, authorization and accounting (AAA). Such mechanisms are already deployed in the existing e-Infrastructures, although further evolution is required to satisfy all requirements. Offering the SDI by simply creating a new AAA platform without any assessment of the state-of-the art would not be desirable from a cost perspective or from a usability perspective. Furthermore, the existing infrastructures already offer, to a large extent, the necessary functionality.

The key objective is thus to enable inter-operability among existing e-Infrastructures as much as possible to offer high quality services for researchers, funding agencies and the public at large in a cost effective way.

This new way of working has generated and generates a huge volume of data, whose exchange and curation pose significant challenges.

To address this point. the High-Level Expert Group on Scientific Data (also known as HLEG on Scientific Data) recommends in its report (Riding the Wave )  the creation of a directive to set up a unified authentication and authorisation system, which they envision would pave the way to distributed and collaborative authentication, authorisation and accounting (AAA) for scientific data. As a result of the recommendation of the HLEG on Scientific Data, the European Commission has tendered to award funding to study the feasibility and impact of adapting the existing, widely used AAA platforms and services to be fully compliant with the requirements posed by the use of data/information resources (such as papers).

In December 2011 the call for tender was awarded to the Consortium composed of the following four partners:

  • TERENA (Trans European Research and Education Networking Association), the leading partner;
  • LIBER (Association of European Research Libraries);
  • UvA (Universiteit van Amsterdam hereafter called UvA);
  • DEENK (University and National Library of Debrecen)

The consortium will work together with the following experts:

  • Diego Lopez (Telefonica I+D)
  • Klaas Wierenga (Cisco Systems)
  • Torbjorn Wiberg (Umea University)
  • Nicole Harris (JISC Advance)

This study will run from Dec 2011 until August 2012.

 

Aim of the Study

The goal of this study is to provide recommendations for the development and deployment of a Scientific Data e-Infrastructure (SDI) that would enable access to heterogonous data for researchers and citizens alike. The SDI should be delivered integrating as much as possible existing AAA platforms (such as those used by the research and education community, or those used by the eScience community).

The study will therefore The study will assess existing AAA-infrastructures; it will identify use-cases for the SDI; it will assess existing AAA-infrastructures as well as the ability for the existing AAA-infrastructures to address these use-cases. The ; the study will also examine the gaps in providing the necessary infrastructure to support the use-cases and explore the work that is being done in the existing AAA-infrastructures to address those needs.

The results of the study in the forms of technical and policy recommendations will be used in developing a strategy, in particular, for Scientific Data Infrastructures in Europe that will support science by providing access to quality services for researchers, funding agencies and for the public at large.

The targeted actors in the study are the research and education communities, information service providers (data centres, libraries) and e-Infrastructure/technology providers.

 

General Study Organization

The goal of the study will be organized in two parts/stagesachieved by meeting three different objectives:

Part Objective I - Assessment of the state-of-the art of the current Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructures (AAI) for e-Science (Objective 1) 

This part will cover the rationale (mostly in the context of the added value for science and society) for building an AAI and will compare scalability, governance (and stakeholders), policies and the widely used technologies; an evaluation of how existing AAI deployed for research and education (in Europe and beyond) could also be used to support other sectors will be provided as well.

– Identify use-cases and their requirements concerning AAA

During this phase of the study, use-cases will be identified via interviews with different user-groups; particularly LIBER and DEENK will collect the requirements from the library, the archive and the humanity communities on data access, data management and governance, data curation and long-term preservation as well as on AAA; TERENA and UvA will collect to requirements from the e-Science and to the networking communities.

The results of these interviews will be used to assess how the existing initiatives can meet the resulting requirements. The rationale for the SDI and its added value to access, store and preserve heterogeneous data will also be highlighted.

Objective II – Analyse existing and emerging infrastructures to address identified use-cases.

A strengths and weaknesses study (SWOT Analysis) of the existing infrastructures will be carry out; during this phase the support for the identified use-cases will also be assessed. Data protection, access issues and trust models will also be considered.

This part of the study will be driven mostly by TERENA, UvA and the experts.

This part of the study will also describe scenarios that would benefit from an integrated AAA and evaluate options to deliver an integrated and manageable AAA/AAI for the SDI (or e-Infrastructure)During this phase of the study, use-cases will be identified via interviews with different user-groups, such as R&E communities, Information Services providers (data centres, libraries), e-Science users and so on.

The outcome of this part of the study will result inbe:

  • A complete overview of the AAA landscape in Europe (with references to US and/or other regions) and the main current trends;
  • A description of the inter-operability features of the AAA systems surveyed in light of their suitability as elements of integrated infrastructures.
  • An evaluation of the user-friendliness of the considered AAA infrastructures.

Part II - Existing and emerging infrastructures analysis to address identified use-cases.

A strengths and weaknesses study (SWOT Analysis) of the existing infrastructure to support the identified use-cases (Objective 2) will be carried out.

Objective III – Recommendations to deliver the SDI

In the third part of the study This part of the study will also describe scenarios that would benefit from an integrated AAA and evaluate options to deliver an integrated and manageable AAA/ AAI for SDI (or e-Infrastructure).The results of the SWOT analysis will also be used to address data protection, access issues, trust issues, and access policies at pan-European levelObjective 3) will be proposed.

The outcome of this part of the study will be:

  • Describe the rationale for the integrated SDI and its added value to access, store and preserve heterogeneous data; 
  • Provide recommendations for adapting the existing, widely used platforms and services to be fully compliant with the requirements posed by the use of data/information resources (papers, catalogues, raw data, images, etc).
  • Provide recommendations on how the European regulations could support such an integrated SDI;
  • Provide technical recommendations for developers to favour specific technologies to ensure future inter-operability;
  • Address the (organizational, legal and technical) challenges to provide pan-Europe AAA/AAI for SDI/e-Infrastructure.

The following objectives and factors will be addressed in the study:

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role of new technologies and standards under development in relevant bodies such as IETF, OGF, OASIS, ISO/ITU-T, IEEE

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A pan-European trustworthy infrastructure for access to research data will stimulate the exchange of information and will give a boost to students’ and researchers’ mobility. It will support libraries and data centres in their core business: making sure that data can be easily made available not only now but also in the near or far future.

Role of libraries in providing access to scientific information and data

Libraries act as an intermediary between researchers and research information and data. Although an increasing amount of material found through libraries is open access and sourced either from open access journals or repositories, a significant amount of the material accessed by researchers through libraries is copyrighted material licensed from rights holders. This material is accessed via different mechanisms and authenticated at different levels.There are also access and authentication issues to be considered when it comes to the  depositing of open access material both for reasons related to digital preservation and for reasons of accountability. Different diciplines require different levels of accountability. In all cases, mechanisms and infrastructures to manage access are needed, for example to avoid misinterpretation or misuse of data, to identify the person requesting access, to identify his/her privileges and to log usage of data, to respect privacy regulations, to deal with ethical issues and to guarantee data quality and integrityas well as industry technologies (social network and others)  and how these will impact of facilitate the provisioning of the SDI will be discussed.



Timetable, Deliverables, and Meetings

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