ADA

Anagrafica di Ateneo - Identity Management

ADA manages the digital identities of people who entertain relationships with the University of Trento. ADA defines their roles, creates and issues the authentication accounts and the access control to the services provided by the University.

Identity management

The fundamental element of ADA is the digital identity of the person, based on the personal information transmitted by the individuals to the organizational units of the University and recorded in the relevant informatics systems. One of ADA activities is the acquisition, normalization and verification of information, which is then made univocal. This process results in the creation of a single digital identity for each person who entertains relationships with the University of Trento. The digital identities of people whose details are not available in the ICT systems of the University can be directly created in the ADA system by the staff offices of the Departments, Managements and Units.

University account

The digital identity is then connected with an ADA ID and a personal account (University account). Both IDs are transmitted to the person in a permanent way. In this way users are identified precisely when the access the University ICT services.

The University account life cycle and of its relevant credentials (username and password) is managed by ADA (e.g. the password expiry date).

ADA roles

The information acquired by ADA from the Unitn information systems are used to define the roles played by people in the organization. Roles may vary if the role of the person in the organization varies (e.g. a Master's degree student becomes a PhD student keeps the same University account but his ADA role is modified). Further, multiple roles may coexist. They may be contemporarily released to the same person (e.g. a PhD student can also have a teacher’s role).

ADA groups and ICT services

The adequate rules which determine the position of a Unitn account in an ADA group are applied to the list of roles owned by a person. Each ADA group is then made up of a precise list of Unitn accounts. The main Unitn ICT services recognize in an ADA group the list of people who have the right to access the group. In this way each person (and the relevant digital identity and Unitn account) are connected to the list of available ICT services). The ADA groups may also be used directly as list of people (e.g. Unitn mailing lists).

Unitn encodes; relations among encodes and re-use of information

An important side-effect of the acquisition and normalization of the personal details in ADA is the definition of the list of encodes and the bodies which describe the roles in the University (e.g. the organizational units the person belongs to) and a series of relations among these University encodes and the correspondent encodes in the University information systems.

These relations are used in order to collect information from different sources and organized it in a homogeneous way (e.g. Organizational chart, Training and Scientific activities in the People system of the University).

The set of data available in ADA is also used as an information database for reference for other information systems and applications (e.g. UGov, TimeSheet, myUnitn, PITre).

Figures regarding ADA (September 2018)

  • Data sources for ADA (FAD): 139
  • Person roles (RUP): 87
  • Identities of individual people (PER): 148,164
  • Personal positions Roles to active people/Total roles (PPE): 197,123/351,598
  • Organizational strucutres: active/total/types (STO/TSO): 1,842/2,324/106
  • Accounts (ACC): 113,759
  • ADA group number active/total (GRU): 3,860/4,460
  • Number of membership in ADA groups active/total (LMG): 1,484,449/3,803,696
  • Number of events (ELO): 31,261,907
  • Number of people trained on ADA (data UFA): 146
  • ADA interface users active: 190

ADA macroelements