CORBEL Report on Common Access Framework Concept

This deliverable presents the Common Access Framework developed within CORBEL work package 5 to manage seamless access to multiple research infrastructures within individual research projects. The ARIA (Access to Research Infrastructure Administration) access management software, developed in-house by Instruct-ERIC to manage their own user access, was adapted to meet the specifications of the CORBEL project and provide a pilot platform for accessing multiple biomedical science Research Infrastructures (RIs) in CORBEL. The platform was tested by scientists belonging to the different scientific communities with research questions at the boundaries of the different research infrastructures through the First CORBEL Open Call which from October 2016 – December 2016. Following the First Open Call, feedback was collected on all areas of infrastructure access through CORBEL, including the WP5 common access pilot platform in ARIA. WP5 used this feedback to improve the platform and, due to the scientific success of the First Open Call, a Second CORBEL Open Call was launched in March 2018 using the ARIA system with these improvements.

In addition to the ARIA platform which enables common access to physical infrastructure and expertise, WP5 worked on a pilot concept for a common authentication and authorisation tool, with the aim to establish an authentication and authorisation infrastructure (AAI) which meets the combined requirements of the biomedical science infrastructures, such that a scientist would be able to access resources with a single unified identity and single sign on. This work culminated in a pilot Life Science AAI, jointly with the AARC2 project where CORBEL WP5 provided the use cases and technical specifications required for the AAI and AARC2 e-infrastructures provided the AAI components and operated the pilot AAI. As a result of this work we plan to continue collaborative efforts with the e-infrastructures to bring into production a full Life Science AAI which will be supported by the EOSC-Life project starting in March 2019.