JISC Programme for Middleware Development

JISC Programme for Middleware Development

Norman Wiseman, JISC Head of Programmes

The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) is funded by the UK higher and further education funding bodies in recognition that information systems are an area where a central body can be particularly effective in providing value for money. The JISC is responsible for the provision of a high performance network linking all UK tertiary education institutions and research council sites. This network is known as JANET (the Joint Academic NETwork) and is managed, on behalf of the JISC, by UKERNA. A wide range of electronic information services is provided by the JISC, and delivered by the JANET network, to higher and further education bodies in the UK, Eire and elsewhere in Europe. The JISC is also charged with exercising vision and leadership and can also stimulate developments which might not other wise take place.

Increasingly, academic staff and researchers, students and institutional administrators are turning to electronic resources for the information they need for their studies or to carry out their jobs. At the same time the number of JISC-funded and commercial information suppliers in the UK is growing quickly. This is creating a demand for a range of new infrastructure services, recently termed Middleware, that manage many of the background tasks necessary to enable the users to enjoy a seamless, integrated view of network resources.

The JISC is funding a development programme which will create an infrastructure to support these services:

• security services, including ATHENS, an access management service
• network traffic measurement
• network storage mechanisms, including a new national mirror service and a national cache
• interoperability, for seamless cross searching across network resources and for better integration of the various components needed for IT-based teaching and learning
• advice and guides to best practice in security and information security strategies

and is working with partners in the Internet 2 project on several of the above areas and on quality of service issues.

Security

The JISC has set up ATHENS, a national access management service. ATHENS provides a unified mechanism for authentication and authorisation of UK university staff and students for the purposes of accessing distributed electronic services across the network. There are currently more than 400,000 registered accounts at more than 250 institutions in the UK and Europe. The service has proved popular with users and administrators, offering both a mechanism to manage accounts locally and access to a wide range of services using a single userid and password combination. The system is very flexible and can be configured to meet different levels of security requirements to suit the nature of the material to be protected.

The JISC is now seeking to develop ATHENS further to cope with new licensing models and to adopt a more open distributed certificate architecture. The certificate architecture will need to follow international standards, and those under development for e-commerce are being considered.

Network Traffic Management

The introduction of charging for scarce network resources in the UK academic community has created a demand for better monitoring of network traffic. This will allow users of resources to be identified clearly and charged for their usage. This is an area which is facing many networking organisations and there are sound reasons for encouraging greater co-operation and sharing of experiences to reduce the costs and difficulties of implementing such facilities and to avoid re-inventing the wheel.

Network Storage Mechanisms

The JISC has set up national mirroring and cache services to reduce the load on expensive transatlantic links and to improve the response to the desktop. These services are being encouraged to work together closely and to also work with other national resource location services to improve the performance of information searching applications. Links with the Internet 2 Digital Storage Network project are being pursued.

Interoperability

Better standards of interoperability and co-operation between applications is needed for the user to perceive network services as an integrated whole. The JISC is funding several centres and groups to investigate potentially useful technologies and to improve awareness both of the importance of standards and of recent developments. One centre is looking at interoperability for better resource searching and location and the other for delivery of network-based teaching and learning, in collaboration with the Instructional Management System in the USA.

Awareness

The JISC has funded a series of studies into the requirements of higher education for security services and has publicised the results widely in the community. One major recommendation was that institutions develop Information Security Strategies to complement Information Technology, Information Service and general Information Strategies. A number of pilot sites are testing implementations of British Standards for security practice in their institutions. There is, however, still a lot of work to be done to increase awareness of the importance of security within senior management.

The JISC is also monitoring many of the other Internet 2 Middleware Working Groups, and in particular the Quality of Service and IPv6 Groups. The outputs of these are expected to be of great relevance to JANET services.

The development of middleware services will require new, close partnerships between networking organisations, information service providers and application developers. This will ensure that the systems developed make most effective and efficient use of existing networks and take full advantage of anticipated network developments. It will also allow network managers to keep abreast of demand for new network services, for example the delivery of audio and video services across wide area networks. They can provide valuable expertise on the technical feasibility of proposals and be alerted to upcoming demands for additional network bandwidth.

The role of the JISC means that it can co-ordinate these activities in the UK. However it would be interested in collaboration with organisations such as TERENA in order to share experiences and foster collaborative initiatives in the Middleware area.

Norman Wiseman

JISC Head of Programmes

Cherry Tree Buildings

University of Nottingham

Nottingham NG7 2RD

United Kingdom

+44 (0)115 951 4799