E-NOTES, MARCH-APRIL 2002 -- TOMORROW'S INTERNET, CONT. PAGE 3

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"Tomorrow's Internet": A Georgetown Technologist's Advanced Research
page 1, page 2, page 3

The HEBCA, in concert with other developing technologies such as the Internet2 Shibboleth project and the NSF Middleware Initiative combining GRID and University infrastructures, will increase capabilities by, for example, allowing guest-teaching faculty to use their Georgetown logins on other universities' systems. An excellent in-depth explanation of this technology can be found in Mark A. Luker's EDUCAUSE Quarterly article, "A 'Bridge' for Trusted Electronic Communications in Higher Education and the Federal Government".

Work on HEBCA is proceeding nicely. In late January, as EDUCAUSE reported, the University of Alabama, Birmingham; the University of Wisconsin, Madison; and Dartmouth College successfully tested the HEBCA at a "proof of concept" demonstration for the media.² All three institutions used different types of digital certificates, yet all were able to send digitally-signed electronic grant forms to NIH, where the forms were validated instantaneously. And on January 23, 2002, at the Computer Security and Information Assurance Conference, this Higher Education PKI Interoperability Pilot Project was awarded the Management and Leadership Best Practice Award. Georgetown University played a central role in this demonstration by providing a unique directory service that linked the participating institutions. This directory will also be incorporated into the Federal Government's Bridge CA in the coming months.

In the past, the high-tech industry has concentrated on constructing faster and faster networks and the applications to use them. Rather than incrementally improve today's systems, Internet2 seeks to reevaluate them and imagine greater possibilities for the future. "Georgetown's active participation in the Internet2 Middleware project has delivered a real payoff to the development of the University's technology infrastructure," says Lambert. "It has enabled us to be well out front in deploying new directory and authentication services to support our new services such as Access+, Blackboard, GUMail and GUCalendar." Middleware, the next set of infrastructures for the Internet, enables new applications that will integrate global services into a manageable set of communities sharing resources and information. Implementing middleware will ease account management, improve network and Internet security, facilitate access to resources at other institutions, and much more.

1. See http://middleware.internet2.edu/ for the complete text.
   
2. A short video presented at the "proof of concept" demonstration can be viewed in RealPlayer format at http://www.educause.edu/asp/doclib/abstract.asp?ID=
   NET0023.

Devlan Nocera is a technical writer for University Information Services.