National experiments
Experiment 6: Identity federation experiment (ICCU, GARR)
To ease uptake and support locally at ICCU for conducting Experiment 4, a side-project was conducted to establish and configure an Identity provider (IdP) service at ICCU with the help of INFN Catania and GARR. This IdP service provides authentication services so that institutional users can keep using their institutional authentication credentials for using remote services. Specifically, this would allow curators working at ICCU to upload digital assets (i.e., data and metadata) through the eCSG using their institutional credentials.
Specifically, this would allow curators working at ICCU to upload digital assets (i.e. data and metadata) through the eCSG using their institutional credentials. Authentication and authorization are then decoupled: the former is done by the user's organisation (ICCU in this specific case), while the latter is done by the Service Provider (the eCSG in this specific case).
Experiment 7: Experimenting with national e-Infrastructure in Poland
The experiment involved the Silesian Digital Library (SDL) in Katowice, Poland, and the Polish e-Infrastructure service Archival Services of the PLATON – Science Services Platform (PNSC).
SDL and PSNC agreed to conduct a proof of concept related to addressing the issues of scaling the archived content storage capacity, improving the physical protection level of the data, and providing a platform that enables efficient and reliable storage, collecting and sharing massive data sets including high resolution source and archival versions of the assets.
End-users experience during the tests was positive in general. Ease of use of the virtual file-system interfaces was appreciated, especially by voluntary participants of Social Digitization Workshop. Also the performance of the data storage and access tools were considered as acceptable. As uploading large data sets effectively and reliability in the environment where the network quality is poor (this happens especially in case of small partnering institutions) poses a challenge, NDS2 GUI’s support for monitoring and managing upload and download jobs was considered useful.
