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Guan Xi

The Guanxi project is a JISC core middleware project to explore areas within the categories:

and runs for 18 months from April 2004 until September 2005 with the aim of investigating: “the extension of existing VLE and zero-administration account management to operate between institutions co-operating to teach modules to groups of students drawn from both or several institutions. Exploitation of such stable long-life Virtual Organisations to explore administration tools for use by teaching staff”.

The project will extend functionality in two necessary areas:

  1. The use of a VLE to allow users to create and manage attributes. The Bodington VLE, which originated from the University of Leeds, will be integrated with Shibboleth and each of the partners will run one VLE capable of making attribute responses and attribute requests.
  2. The creation of a more advanced attribute authority which is able to integrate attributes from multiple and diverse data sources in an Institution. This work will be based on the Siva system which originates from the UHI Millennium Institute.

Combining the two areas of work will allow an Institution to run a single attribute authority, based on Siva, which can form an attribute response by accessing multiple SQL databases, an LDAP directory and multiple VLE installations. The users of the VLEs will be able to manage membership of groups that will map onto attribute names in an institutional namespace. This will support a number of inter-organisational learning and teaching and research related on-line activities that are managed by users and are not currently well supported by Shibboleth.

The project is intended to run for 18 calendar months, beginning 01/04/2004.

At the end of phase I, all three project partner institutions will have implemented an instance represented by Scenario 1, including a Shibboleth compliant instance of Bodington which will be able to communicate with other Shibboleth compliant applications including other Bodington VLE installations. All sites are already using, on an institutional level, a common VLE, the Bodington VLE.

Simultaneously, work will begin on the components necessary to extend the system to the functionality described in Scenario 2.

In phase II, starting with the next academic year, 2004/2005, the Guanxi system will be extended with planned developments and trialled over the academic year through existing course provision. Over this phase, analysis of the impact of implementation of a number of Shibboleth Clubs will provide important and evidence based results for the institutional implications and requirements for the wide-scale engineering and deployment of such arrangements. Guanxi will continue over the full academic year and complete with an evaluation and organized dissemination, to complete by end September 2005.

Further information: http://guanxi.uhi.ac.uk/ and http://sourceforge.net/projects/guanxi/