[mdx] MDX & expressing communites-of-interest

[Thomas Lenggenhager]

Ian Young wrote:
> On 18 May 2009, at 18:14, Scott Cantor wrote:
>> There's still another one, which is a SAML "affiliation", which has
>> metadata
>> support already (though not in the sense that we've implemented anything
>> based on it).
> ...
> This does seem to me like the best way of expressing the community
> membership issue; no need to invent new formats plus the potential of
> doing metadata exchange of this kind of entity descriptor using the same
> rules we use for IdP and SP entities.  This is a huge plus, I think, as
> it means that community membership is in no way tied to the same
> registrar or registrars as are used to register the community members.

What needs to be solved for operational reasons:
Anyone can assert an affiliation membership for a collection of
entityIDs, even without these entities are aware of and do agree!
That is like http links resolving to 404 :-)

Some policy expressed in practice statements will have to be linked to
the affiliation membership assertion in order to become operationally
practical.

Otherwise I agree, it is a simple way to express sch groupings.

Thomas

-- 
SWITCH
Serving Swiss Universities
--------------------------
Thomas Lenggenhager
P.O. Box, 8021 Zurich, Switzerland
phone +41 44 268 1505  direct +41 44 268 1541
http://www.switch.ch