country information in discofeed

[Peter Schober]

* Peter Schober <peter.schober at univie.ac.at> [2020-04-20 21:01]:
> * 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.

Someone reminded me off-list that we do have a place to carry
e.g. geolocation data in MDUI, in
md:IDPSSODescriptor/md:Extensions/mdui:DiscoHints/mdui:GeolocationHint
That doesn't give you "country", but it does give you a physical
location you can derive the country from using other/more tools.

In practices that's (still) moot, since most IDPs won't have that
information populated in their metadata. (Checking this now even I
only have it for ~42% of our IDPs.).

So you might as well try to derive the country from ccTLDs in
entityIDs and protocol endpoints (or mdui:DomainHint and IPHint[1],
when avialable, which they often won't be, either) and/or from the
registrationAuthority (cf. my previous post) in combination with
checks of the registrar's MDRPS (registration practice statement).
Of course none of this is fast, easy and precise, and most of scales
badly if you want the information to be worth anything.

But again, please do discuss this with the community on the
edugain-discuss mailing list. Or contact the eduGAIN support if this
is for some project academic project the international community will
be interested in.

-peter

[1] Which again could be used with geo-ip database lookups to provide
    some sort of "country" information.