RIO Functionality

RIO stands for Register Instellingen en Opleidingen. It is a Dutch national register provided by DUO in which educational institutions record three things: their educational offerings, how they are organized, and how to get in touch with them. DUO and other accrediting organizations record accreditations and licenses in RIO. SURFeduhub provides functionality to support Dutch educational institutions with filling and maintaining their information in RIO. More information about RIO and usage of the register can be found at the RIO Kennisbank.

Prerequisites to use the RIO functionality

To fill and maintain their information in RIO using SURFeduhub, institutions must meed the following conditions:

• Have a functioning OOAPI endpoint:
  • That is connected to SURFeduhub. See Documentation for data providers (institutions) for more information on how to connect your endpoint.
  • That implements the necessary requests for RIO. See the OOAPI documentation for more information on the mapping between OOAPI and RIO and which requests are required.
• Implement functionality to use the RIO Functionality API to send notifications to SURFeduhub when an entity intended for RIO has been created, updated, or deleted.
• Have their basic information about locations and providers entered in RIO (information provided by DUO).
• Have completed the initial migration necessary to synchronize the institution administration with the RIO administration.

Technical overview of the RIO functionality

The following paragraphs provide a brief technical overview. For more detailed information about check out these links:

• Sequence diagrams describing the flow between the institution, SURFeduhub and DUO/RIO
• Notifying SURFeduhub about relevant changes and retrieving information from SURFeduhub
• The relationship between SURFeduhub, the OOAPI specification and RIO
• The initial migration necessary before automatic updates can be processed by SURFeduhub

Component diagram of the RIO Functionality

The RIO functionality of SURFeduhub works as follows:

1. Inside the information systems of the institution, a change occurs that is relevant for the RIO register.
2. The institution notifies SURFeduhub about this change by issuing a HTTP POST request.
3. SURFeduhub processes the change by retrieving the relevant information from the institution using HTTP GET requests as specified by the OOAPI v5 specification.
4. 3, continued: sometimes, more than one request is necessary.
5. SURFeduhub builds the SOAP request necessary to update the relevant information in RIO.

The simplified sequence diagram below shows the same flow, but slightly more detailed:

Simplified sequence diagram of the RIO functionality

This diagram also shows how an institution can find out whether an update was processed successfully by SURFeduhub. When posting an update, the institution receives a token. With the token the institution can poll SURFeduhub until the update has been processed.