MACE-Dir Call 10-August-2009

**Attending**
Brendan Bellina, USC (chair)

Russ Beale, USC

Michael Pelikan, The Penn State U.

Ann West, Internet2/Educause

Scott Cantor, The Ohio State U.

Todd Piket, Minnesota State Colleges and Universities

Tom Barton, U. Chicago

Steve Olshansky, Internet2 (scribe)

**Carryover Action Items**

[AI] (Mike) review the LocalDomainPerson survey results and the Shibboleth attribute naming documentation with an eye toward useful attributes to generalize, as a reference for naming guidelines and base attributes to propose.

http://middleware.internet2.edu/dir/localsurvey.html

http://middleware.internet2.edu/dir/docs/internet2-mace-dir-localdomainperson-200505.html

[AI] (RL "Bob") will craft a survey on use of the mail attribute and possible need for additional email attributes.

[AI] (Brendan) will poll the mailing list for feedback on the use of name fields, and whether they have had the need to extend eduPerson locally with additional name fields.

[AI] (Brendan) will coordinate with the leaders of the Educause IdM Constituent Group, toward the goal of polling that group along with MACE-Dir for feedback on the use of commercial and open-source IdM products.

**Update on National Student Clearinghouse pilot**

USC has recently implemented federated access to NSC, with some support from Stanford who was the first pilot school. To date it has gone smoothly.

Russ reported that the process was not very difficult, and not unlike setting up access to other SPs. NSC requires a few attributes, and USC simply needed to map the appropriate data items on their end. Since both are InCommon, there was no special metadata juggling required.

OPEID (Office of Post-Secondary Education ID) is the school identifier code used, and is used by NSC to direct the user to the appropriate link without having to go through the WAYF.

It was noted that there was coordination required between the IT shop and the registrar's office to gather the information required by NSC to set this up.

The USC identifier, a 10-digit code, is used in addition to the SSN in the data feed, for use in identifying users. The SSN is still required for government compliance reasons by NSC. USC would have liked to use EPTID, but NSC has a length limitation for their identifiers which was too short.

Q: Couldn't NSC hash the EPTID?

A: Apparently not, for reasons not clear, but NSC is looking at increasing the accepted field length so EPTID may be usable in the future.

The definitions for OPEID and the institutional student identifier are coming from the PESC transcript standard, and they have been approached about becoming the steward for the SAML attribute definitions ongoing. More to come on this as it develops.

U. Washington is also working on federated access to NSC, details on that implementation were not available on this call.

Tom reported that in U. Chicago's negotiation with NSC, reference to the InCommon POP is acceptable in contract language, in lieu of NIST LoA references.

Questions and discussion about the USC pilot are welcomed, please direct to the list...

**Next call 24-August 4:30 PM EDT**