eduGAIN isFederated Check - Additional Information

This page provides additinioal information relevant for users of the eduGAIN isFederated Check tool.

Description and Features

• Check if user or organisation is federated and in eduGAIN using an e-mail address or domain name
• List all known production academic identity federations including their eduGAIN coverage and metadata freshness
• List and search all Organisations in eduGAIN

How does it work?

The isFederated Check gathers and processes metadata of all known academic identity federations. This data is then used to list and search for organisations. There are a few limitations you should know about but if you find it useful, you might also consider querying it via the REST/JSON API. Rest assured that the data you provide is neither stored nor used in any other way than for displaying the results on this page.

Limitations

If email addresses are entered, this check assumes that they are are managed by the organisation the user of that address is affiliated with (e.g. his university). Email addresses from commercial email providers (e.g. GMail, Hotmail, etc.) of course cannot be associated to research and education organisations.
The isFederated check sometimes cannot show detailed organisation information for Identity Providers of federations that use a hub & spoke architecture. In such federations there is a central Identity Provider/Service Provider proxy in the middle of the federation. Individual metadata of federated institutions is not always published because their metadata has only be to known at the central hub. Fortunately, for most of these federations at least the name and the domain name of the federated institutions are published but not more. Therefore, the central federation hub is displayed in the results in addition to the (limited) organisation information. Federations that use a hub & spoke architecture are for example: SURFconext (NL), FEIDE (NO), WAYF.dk (DK), SIR (ES), TAAT (EE), AAI@EduHr (HR).

Data Privacy

All data provided to this tool is exclusively used to extract domain names. Data is generally not stored on the server, except in the web server logs in case the JSON API is used with HTTP GET parameters. Data is used for nothing else than to generate the results below. Instead of providing real email addresses, it's also possible to provide the domain component (e.g. "@switch.ch") of the email address only.

REST/JSON API

The isFederated Check tool also provides a JSON interface that allows querying information via a simple HTTP GET request. All that is needed is to call this page with the GET parameters data and format.
data contains one or more space-separated URL-encoded email addresses, domain names, URLs or URIs. Basically the same information one would inter in the text area on the web page.
format currently allows only json or html (default) as values.
Two sample URLs to query the interface therefore are:

• https://technical.edugain.org/isFederatedCheck/?format=json&data=info@switch.ch+http%3A%2F%2Fwww.epfl.ch+urn:mace:incommon:mit.edu+cam.ac.uk
• https://technical.edugain.org/isFederatedCheck/Federations?format=json
• https://technical.edugain.org/isFederatedCheck/Federations?format=jsonp
• https://technical.edugain.org/isFederatedCheck/Organisations?format=json
• https://technical.edugain.org/isFederatedCheck/Organisations?format=jsonp

The returned data is JSON encoded. It should be self-explanatory when comparing to the HTML output.