country information in discofeed

[Peter Schober]

* Sathyaprasad, Sandeep (NIH/CIT) [C] <sathyaprasads at mail.nih.gov> [2020-04-20 19:33]:
> Is it possible to get country information from the list of eDUGain
> IDPs listed in InCommon metadata from the discoveryfeed? Currently
> we are getting all the eDUGain IDPs from the metadata but are unable
> to classify them based on country.

Not from the DiscoFeed, no.

Not really from anywhere else, either. Mostly because it's not clear
what constitutes "the country" for a given entity[1] not is there a
place where people would record and exchange such information.

The closest thing you'll find is the registrar/federtion operator that
registered the metadata for the entity[2], which is available in
eduGAIN metadata (and therefore in InCommon metadata[3]).

Which of course does not mean anything about the location or laws
governing a given IDP, though many/most academic federations in
eduGAIN today only register IDPs from the area/region/policy sphere
they operate in. With the largest federations on the planet
(e.g. UKfederation, possibly InC, too) being exceptions to this rule.

Mostly those registrars/federations will operate in non-overlapping
nation states / regions, but not always. In some edge cases you'll get
by that with an n:1 mapping (multiple federations mapping to a single
country, e.g. in Russia or Oman) but there are exceptions, too, with
federations operating in more than one country (e.g. WAYF operating in
Denmark and Iceland).
https://technical.edugain.org/status has the details.

Taking a step back:

If this is about IDP Discovery the best reponse would be: Forget about
the country and just have people select their IDP in other ways. Look
at https://seamlessaccess.org/ for current design and UX examples.

If this is about licensing or comparably strictz legal requirements
I'm afraid you'll have to prepare for some manual review work, at
least.
Either way, the best place for such questions is likely the
edugain-discuss mailing list[4], not this Shibboleth software
community list.

Best regards,
-peter

[1] The only exception I know about being the GEANT Data Protection
    Code of Conduct (for Federation) v1 that has a requirement for SPs to
    list "the national material law of the country in which the Service
    Provider is established". Irrelevant to you, if course, if you're
    after IDPs.
[2] //md:EntityDescriptor/md:Extensions/mdrpi:RegistrationInfo/@registrationAuthority
[3] Where InC would have no such data InC itself would be the implied registrar.
[4] https://lists.geant.org/sympa/info/edugain-discuss