The objective of notice management is to reduce the number of interactions (‘clicks’ and other ‘interruptions’) users face in order to achieve their actual desired objectives, both on first use and on subsequent use of the same services in a similar workflow. As proposed in AARC-G083, Guidance for Notice Management by Proxies:
All notice presenters (proxies, communities, and service and data providers) SHOULD provide machine-readable identifiers and associated registry meta-data for the notices they can present to users.
Ideally Research Infrastructures should converge on the same policies, but that is often not feasible due to internal requirements (e.g. geographical, risk-tolerance etc.) In this case, a meta-data structure is proposed to clarify which additional policies are augmented by a policy, or included within it. Research Infrastructures are increasingly stacked and connected, meaning that researchers are interrupted to accept notifications of many policies to complete their work. Some of these policies are the same, and by publishing structured data about the policies it is possible to compute whether a new notification is required for a user to access a service.
What are these "Notifications"?
Concretely, the notifications that impact usability are acceptance of Acceptable Use Policies and Privacy Notices.
The WISE AUP is recommended by AARC as a common Acceptable Use Policy. No particular privacy notice is recommended by AARC due to diverging regional requirements.
What does notification meta-data look like?
Full details are available at AARC-G083. The following is an example of a fictional AUP at URL "https://www.nikhef.nl/aup/" required to access Nikhef. It includes a secondary policy "https://documents.egi.eu/document/2623", meaning that acceptance of this policy constitutes acceptance of the secondary policy.
{
"id": "urn:doi:10.60953/68611c23-ccc7-4199-96fe-74a7e6021815",
"aut": "https://www.nikhef.nl/",
"aut_name": "Nikhef",
"valid_from": 1649023200,
"ttl": 604800,
"contacts": [
"helldesk@nikhef.nl",
"information-security@nikhef.nl"
],
"security_contacts": [
"abuse@nikhef.nl"
],
"privacy_contacts": [
"privacy@nikhef.nl"
],
"policy_class": "acceptable-use",
"notice_refresh_period": 34214400,
"includes_policy_uris": [
"https://documents.egi.eu/document/2623"
],
"policy_uri": "https://www.nikhef.nl/aup/",
"description#nl_NL": "Deze Gebruiksvoorwaarden betreffen het gebruik van
netwerk en computers bij Nikhef.Iedere gebruiker van deze middelen of
diensten wordt geacht op hoogte te zijn van deze voorwaarden en deze na te
leven.
",
"description": "This Acceptable Use Policy governs the use of the Nikhef
networking and computer services;all users of these services are expected
to understand and comply to these rules.
"
}
The following is an example of a fictional "purpose binding" policy at URL "https://operations-portal.egi.eu/vo/view/voname/xenon.biggrid.nl" that augments the WISE AUP with its description field "detector construction and experiment analysis for the search of dark matter using Xenon detectors". This means that a user would be shown the WISE AUP with the placeholder for purpose binding filled in with this description.
{
"id": "https://operations-portal.egi.eu/vo/view/voname/xenon.biggrid.nl",
"aut": "https://xenonexperiment.org/",
"aut_name": "Xenon-nT collaboration",
"valid_from": 1311890400,
"ttl": 31557600,
"contacts": [
"grid.support@nikhef.nl",
],
"security_contacts": [
"vo-xenon-admins@biggrid.nl"
],
"policy_class": "purpose",
"augments_policy_uris": [
"https://wise-community.org/wise-baseline-aup/v1/"
],
"policy_uri": "https://operations-portal.egi.eu/vo/view/voname/xenon.biggrid.nl",
"description": "detector construction and experiment analysis for the
search of dark matter using Xenon detectors "
}
Resources
- AARC-G083 Guidance for Notice Management by Proxies https://aarc-community.org/guidelines/aarc-g083/