If you are using software from a third party provider, you will join EWP via your provider. Please contact your provider to inform about the status of their implementation. |
Below you can find information on how your provider can join EWP.
Your third party provider will have to sign the Terms of Use Collaboration Agreement as a third party provider. They need to send it to us as a signed PDF. On the EWP side Joao Bacelar (Executive Director of the European University Foundation - EUF) signs it for the EWP consortium as representative of the coordinating institution.
It is up to the third party provider to keep evidence that it has your official permission to send the data over the EWP Network and which APIs are to be covered by the Provider for your institution.
Your third party provider is responsible for the authentication part. Only institutions that have an Erasmus Charter for Higher Education (ECHE) can join the network (organizational units of a given HEI (faculties, departments) are not allowed to connect to the network separately).
In the EWP network we have both a Development (DEV) and a Production (PROD) environment. There are no conditions to enter the Development environment, but the Production environment is where the real data exchanges take place, so you need to fulfill several conditions to enter it. |
As a first step your provider needs to send us the URL of the so called manifest file (the manifest includes information about the HEI in question and which services (APIs) it implements). Your provider will either use a specific manifest file for your institution or your institution will be part of general manifest file covering several institutions.
This information will then be entered in the development environment (DEV) so your provider can start testing (ask your provider if they can make a testing installation available).
For each of the APIs supported, the server implementation should work properly to assure the data exchange.
The technical admission procedure consists of four steps:
Technical profile? |
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Once both admission processes have a positive outcome, the EWP Technical Support Team will add the URL of the manifest file(s) to the production registry. By doing so your institution becomes part of the EWP network and agrees to the EWP rules and obligations. In case of a serious violation or complaints by other EWP users a revocation procedure can be installed by contacting us via the Knowledge Base (see below). As part of the obligations, software providers agree not to add additional APIs to their production manifest file before it has released and tested these new APIs in the development environment.
We should keep in mind that things can go wrong. When institutions violate the use of EWP there should be an exit strategy. The contact section in the Knowledge Base will be the central point where institutions can report incidents and complain about the quality of APIs of any particular institution, the unavailability of a server, partners that are not trustworthy, etc ... The EWP Governance structure will try to settle disputes and has the ability to decide to exclude a certain institution from the production registry. The institution will need to prove its ability and trustworthiness again in the development environment. In cases of extreme violation the EWP governance structure has the competence to temporally exclude an institution from EWP.
The entry procedure for institutions who want to join EWP via their in-house or 3rd party software above is currently revised with the aim to automate the entry procedure through a web application. We hope to release this new entry functionality in the course of 2022. |