Enabling efficient electronic collaboration between LIGO and other astronomy communities using federated identity and COmanage

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Abstract:: Identity federations throughout the world including InCommon in the United States, SURFnet in the Netherlands, DFN-AAI in Germany, GakuNin in Japan, and the UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research have made federated identities available for a large number of astronomers, astrophysicists, and other researchers. The LIGO project has recently joined the InCommon federation and is beginning the process to both consume federated identities from outside of LIGO and to make the LIGO identities issued to collaboration members available for consumption by other research communities.
Consuming federated identity, however, is only the beginning. Realizing the promise of multi-messenger astronomy requires efficient collaboration among individuals from multiple communities. Efficient collaboration begins with federated identity but also requires robust collaboration management platforms providing consistent, scalable identity and access control information to collaboration applications including wikis, calendars, mailing lists and science portals. LIGO, together with collaborators from Internet2, is building the COmanage suite of tools for Collaborative Organization Management. Using COmanage and leveraging federated identities we plan to streamline electronic collaboration between LIGO and other astronomy projects so that scientists spend less time managing accounts and access control and more time doing science.

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Publication Information:: To be published in the proceedings of the SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2012 meeting.

LIGO Document P1200074-v3