ELIXIR-UK and DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for Arts and Humanities), in collaboration with ELIXIR Finland and ELIXIR Czech Republic, organised a workshop for service and resource providers on Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructure (AAI). Held in Manchester, UK, on 15-16 March 2016, as part of the AARC project, the event aimed to help infrastructure service providers bring their resources closer to the research community, using federated identity and common AAI services.
In the first part of the two-day workshop the participants were introduced to general principles of federated AAI and learned how to integrate their services into it. The second part of the event featured two parallel sessions, focussing on services specific to ELIXIR and DARIAH.
The ELIXIR session - led by Mikael Linden (ELIXIR Finland - visitor to ELIXIR Hub) and Michal Prochazka (ELIXIR Czech Republic) - showed the participants how to integrate their services to ELIXIR AAI and presented a number of examples of its use: the ELIXIR Intranet, access to sensitive human data and others. The session was attended by a number of service operators from ELIXIR Nodes (ELIXIR UK, EMBL-EBI, ELIXIR Italy) who are planning to use the ELIXIR AAI for their services and platforms. The integration of these services with ELIXIR AAI will take place gradually throughout 2016.
About ELIXIR AAI
ELIXIR Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructure provides services for federated authentication and authorisation of end users of ELIXIR tools and services introducing a common ELIXIR identity to manage and control user access to multiple ELIXIR services, and verify their identity and access rights.
The main advantage of ELIXIR AAI is that it allows researchers accessing ELIXIR services to use their existing online identities (e.g. their university account) to create the ELIXIR identity and access different infrastructure services and tools. It can also connect data archives to authorized could services, making it easier for Data Access Committees to grant and control access to sensitive data.
The development of ELIXIR AAI is led by ELIXIR Finland and ELIXIR Czech Republic.
More information: http://anenadic.github.io/2016-03-15-elixir-aai-workshop-manchester