MACE-Dir WG call
October 22, 2007

*Participants*
Keith Hazelton, U. Wisconsin-Madison (chair)
Etan Weintraub, Johns Hopkins U.
David Bantz, U. Alaska
RL “Bob” Morgan, U. Washington
Tom Barton, U. Chicago
Will Norris, USC
Mark Jones, UT Houston
Nate Klingenstein, Internet2
Steve Olshansky, Internet2
Jessica Bibbee, Internet2 (scribe)

New *Action Items*
[AI] {Keith} will craft a survey question to understand what is going on within the eduCourse space in the real world, as it pertains to Section, and share with relevant mailing lists.

Carry-over *Action Items*
[AI] {Scott} will revise the pilot proposal to add an entry for attribute definition space. (18-Jun-07)

*Agenda*
1. Adding an eduCourseSection attribute to the eduCourse object class:
- An IMS Global Learning Consortium Charter for Enterprise Services V.2 was published in Jan. 2007. Work has been proceeding, and it seems timely to revisit the eduCourse work to see if evolving standards and practices mean there is more useful work to be done in this space. We will discuss the case for the addition of a new eduCourse attribute, eduCourseSection. EduCourseSection, like the existing eduCourseOffering, can have "members" in a variety of roles, so we will also consider extending eduCourseMember to allow for right-hand side identifiers that refer to eduCourseSections.
- We will also revisit the general question about emerging real-world practice vis-a-vis MACE-Dir recommendations in the area of representing course management information in LDAP and SAML expressions.

2. {Etan} will update us on attribute accommodations to successfully interoperate with a CA Siteminder SP at NIH

*Discussion*
-Adding an eduCourseSection attribute to the eduCourse object class-
The Group discussed the need for the eduCourseSection attribute, as eduCourse often does not satisfy the requirements for a class that has multiple occurrences. For example, a single course offering may be comprised of a lecture, recitation, and a lab. Observations from IMS and the each of Group’s learning management system will be very useful in shaping this eduCourseSection attribute.

{Keith} asked the Group if anyone was dealing with attributes in assertions being passed around. {Bob} mentioned what has become registrar issues at U. Washington, as there was a need to have agreement on what exactly a section is. Considering local practice would be a good first step. {Will} said USC adds all course information to registry using eduCourse and a few other attributes for flexibility. He said they are running into not only the traditional memberships of student/instructor/etc., but also whether they have added, dropped or withdrawn a class. Here, it would be useful to append subject-type affiliation, when populating groups, e.g., feeds into Blackboard, etc.

{Will} said they have the flexibility to do the granularity of control as they want, without a need for eduCourseSection. Where a course has a lab, lecture, etc., they are listed as a separate course. {Tom} expressed concern over maintaining association in order to participate in a course. There are many examples where a student must be enrolled in both the lab and lecture. {Keith} said most of the variation is done at the section level; there is no natural way to bundle assertions, so there is profiling and extra work to discern that part of the information model.

{Tom} suggested the Group identify a solid use case for eduCourseSection. He also advised the group review the information model and others similar, to ensure that there is no duplication of focus or effort. He asked the Group to think about what the next generation of learning management system will look like. How will the definition of learning management system expand in functions over current options? The Group ought to consider the appropriate timing to do surveys and seek out current practices and gaps.

[AI] {Keith} will craft a survey question to understand what is going on within the eduCourse space in the real world, as it pertains to Section, and share with relevant mailing lists.

The Group also discussed the relevance of web services to the aim of the MACE-Dir Working Group. {Bob} feels that this area of work is of direct interest to the Group’s efforts, as they have the insight to respond with justification on the issues.

Discussion with one vendor has pointed to the potential influence of the MACE-Dir Working Group, regarding their position on, e.g., attributes for course rosters. The Group will continue discussion on what they will strongly recommend vs. simply suggest in terms of content, as well as semantics.

- Etan will update us on attribute accommodations to successfully interoperate with a CA Siteminder SP at NIH-
{Etan} gave a brief description of some of the work taking place at Johns Hopkins, as well as some of the challenges he has seen in terms of support. He suggested seeking federating alternatives to Siteminder, if possible. While it worked initially, it was sending another attribute that contained the scoped value. {Scott Cantor} suggested having another attribute using OID as definition (i.e., ePPN), though sourcing out of the original attribute. This leads to SAML 2.0, in terms of expression.

{Keith} suggested they collect similar stories and continue discussion on the mailing list.

The next MACE-Directory Working Group call will be held on Monday, November 5, 2007 at 4:30pm EDT.

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-C.f. Keith’s email on 22-Oct-07, subject: MACE-Dir: Agenda additions and supplements-
Additional agenda item (1.5) Etan will update us on attribute accommodations we've made at John's Hopkins Medical Institutions and UW-Madison to successfully interoperate with a CA Siteminder SP at NIH.

For item one on eduCourse, we will make reference to the eduCourse Data Model at:

< http://middleware.internet2.edu/courseid/docs/internet2-mace-dir-courseID-eduCourse-200507.html >

...and to the IMS Enterprise Services v.2 Charter at:

< http://www.imsglobal.org/getpdf.cfm?DocName=ESv2p0Charter.pdf >

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-C.f. Keith’s email on 22-Oct-07, subject: MACE-Dir: Agenda additions and supplements, part two-
For agenda item 2: Identity Assurance Qualifiers (was LOA) in SAML assertions; Establishing conventions for URI-based representations.

Draft proposal of Identity Assurance Qualifiers (IAQ):  Specific URIs for InCommon use

any valid URI is associated with a specific identity assurance scheme and a value within that scheme.

Specific example:  InCommon namespace, InCommon Identity Assurance Profile, specific profiles called silver and bronze within that:

urn:mace:incommon:iap:silver
urn:mace:incommon:iap:bronze