Andy Powell links to a presentation by Leigh Dodd at the Society for Scholarly Publishing on federated access. After years of struggling to explain federated access management, I realise that the missing component was South Park characters! My only comment is to question the statement that Shibboleth is library-centric. The original vision for Shibboleth was for internal use - such as the deployment at Ohio State which manages more than 70 unique internal Service Providers such as course management systems, portals and business reports systems. I don’t think we have realised the potential for this type of application within the UK as yet, and fear the library-focused moniker may be a legacy of the UK interest in Shibboleth and our focus on library-type resources.

I was also interested in the opening comments within the presentation that refers to the proliferation of identity and access management within web 2.0 applications such as Facebook and Flickr. Given the well documented problems and breaches in identity management within these systems it would be great to see such systems adopting a federated approach…but wonder what the incentive might be to these organisations in giving up the benefits they currently gain from managing their own identity management?