e-Culture Science Gateway
The DCH-RP e-Culture Science Gateway (eCSG) aims at proposing a model to enable transparent access to Digital Cultural Heritage contents for as many researchers around the world as possible. However, the management of authorisation procedures, if implemented in a traditional way, i.e. assigning credentials to each new user and maintaining them during their lifecycle, would imply a significant overhead for the eCSG. In the meantime, end users would also get an additional set of credentials to be remembered and kept private, with the usual drawbacks: usage of weak passwords, re-use of the same password (thus weakening security levels) and risk of identity theft. For these reasons, we have decided to implement Federated Access to the eCSG. This approach offers a number of advantages:
- The pool of potential users dramatically increases and it is immediately extended to all end users belonging to existing identity federations supported by the eCSG;
- The eCSG manager is relieved of the responsibility for creating and keeping on its servers the users’ credentials, as they are managed by Identity Providers at single Federated organizations which connect to the eCSG;
- End users do not need to obtain, manage and remember a new set of credentials, and use the usual credentials provided by their home organization.
So far, the DCH-RP eCSG is integrated into IDEM, the Italian AAI Federation dedicated to Research, Education and Culture, managed by GARR, and GrIDP, a “catch-all” federation also managed by GARR. Through IDEM, the DCH-RP eCSG is also a Service Provider of the eduGAIN inter-federation.
Instructions about how to access the DCH-RP e-Culture Science Gateway can be found at http://ecsg.dch-rp.eu/register-to-sign-in.
The DCH-RP e-Culture Science Gateway also comes as an app for mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, available both on App Store and Google Play.
