Ed Note: The following press release from InCommon discussed Berkeley Lab's role in Federated Identity projects. Berkeley Lab was the first National Laboratory to join InCommon.
---- Press Release from InCommon:
Ann Arbor, Mich. June 21, 2011 Research organizations, including
government labs and virtual organizations, can now join InCommon and
take advantage of federated identity management for shared services,
scientific collaborations, and other online applications.
By joining InCommon, scientists at U.S. research facilities and
universities can more easily share resources, which will improve
collaboration, said Jack Suess, chair of the InCommon Steering
Committee and vice provost of information technology and chief
information officer at UMBC. With the close connection between
universities and research organizations, and the growing popularity of
virtual organizations, this should be a big boost and time saver for
all of our participants.
This is the third category of organizations now eligible to join
InCommon. In addition to research organizations, the 290 participants
include higher education institutions and sponsored partners companies
and non-profits that offer web-based resources and services. InCommon
is operated by Internet2 and provides a suite of trust services for
the U.S. education and research communities.
Particular interest and motivation came from Science Identity
Federation, a project funded by the Department of Energy Office of
Science, and organized by Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) and Lawrence
Berkeley National Lab with support from other DOE national labs and
facilities.
Fostering collaboration is one of the main objectives of the InCommon
Federation. The federation provides a secure and privacy-protecting
method for giving individuals access to protected or licensed online
resources, such as library databases, multimedia content, research
information, collaboration tools, and services provided by government
agencies. In a federation, all participating organizations agree on
standard policies, practices and technology standards for all
interactions, making it easily scalable.
For more information on InCommon and a full list of participants,
visit: http://www.incommon.org
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ABOUT InCOMMON InCommon serves the U.S. education and research
communities, supporting a common framework of trust services and
operating the InCommon Federation, the U.S. trust federation for
research and education, and the community-driven InCommon Certificate
Service. The InCommon Federation enables scalable, trusted
collaborations among its community of participants. Identity Providers
give their users single sign-on convenience and privacy protection,
while Service Providers control access to their protected
resources. The Certificate Service offers unlimited certificates to
the U.S. higher education community for one fixed annual fee. For
more information, see www.incommon.org.
ABOUT INTERNET2 Internet2 is an advanced networking consortium led by
the research and education community. An exceptional partnership
spanning U.S. and international institutions who are leaders in the
worlds of research, academia, industry and government, Internet2 is
developing breakthrough cyberinfrastructure technologies that support
the most exacting applications of today and spark the most essential
innovations of tomorrow. Led by its members and focused on their
current and future networking needs since 1996, Internet2 blends its
human, IP and optical networks to develop and deploy revolutionary
Internet technologies. For more information see www.internet2.edu.
