Negotiator

Negotiator, an open-source access management solution featuring a customizable workflow engine, along with messaging, notifications and moderation support.

Goal

This project aims to develop an extensively customizable access management system designed to efficiently structure and streamline the process of resource access requests within multinational research infrastructures.

State

Negotiator is currently used for mediating access to biological data and samples in BBMRI-ERIC. Using one of BBMRI-ERIC discovery services such as the Directory or the GBA SampleLocator researchers can browse and locate collections of bio specimens, and then request access via BBMRI-ERIC Negotiator by filling out a request form and then following individual steps of the Negotiation lifecycle. This is a new implementation of the Negotiator, version 3.0.0 and is still under active development. Reference UI implementation for BBMRI can be found in this repository. Documentation for the new REST API can be found here. An older version of this service can be found in this repository.

The Negotiator as an Access Management System:

Key Domain entities:

Resource: Any resource/entity that is listed in an external discovery service, and has a unique and persistent identifier. (e.g., collection of biological samples, research service, specialized treatment...)
Request: A depiction of a query from a data discovery service specifying the resource/resources of interest and filtering criteria used to find them in the discovery service.
Negotiation: An access application consisting of one or multiple requests that is linked to an authenticated user.
Representative: A physical person responsible for mediating access to a resource in their jurisdiction.

Basic usage example

Using an external discovery service connected to the Negotiator, the user identifies resources they are interested in getting access to, and passes them as a Request to the Negotiator. Once authenticated, the user then fills out a resource-specific access form and submits the request for review. Once the request is approved by an administrator, it becomes a Negotiation where resource representatives, moderators and the requester can interact with it.

Quick Start

Negotiator application can also be spun up using the provided Docker image. To run the application with a mock authorization server using the OAuth2 protocol, see this docker compose file.

To create a request and start the access workflow, run the following curl command:

curl --location 'http://localhost:8080/api/v3/requests' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data '{
    "url": "https://bbmritestnn.gcc.rug.nl",
    "humanReadable": "#1: No filters used.\r\n#2: No filters used.",
    "resources": [{
        "id": "bbmri-eric:ID:CZ_MMCI:collection:LTS"
    }]
}'

Development

For contributing, please read our contribution guidelines.

Prerequisites

Java 17
Maven
Spring
Docker engine

Running the backend in dev mode

mvn clean spring-boot:test-run -Dspring-boot.run.profiles=dev

The dev mode requires a relational database, details can be found below.

Connection URL for the Postgres test container database

Using the springboot test containers, the application spins up a postgres database. Default credentials are: negotiator:negotiator jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/negotiator

System architecture

Documentation for individual components:

License

Licensed under GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

BBMRI-ERIC / negotiator

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