Terminologies and Roles

Terminologies

For establishing background knowledge, here are a few terms.

Project

An FL study with identified participants.

Org

An organization that participates in the study.

Site

The computing system that runs NVFLARE application as part of the study. There are two kinds of sites: Server and Clients. Each site belongs to an organization.

FL Server

An application running on a Server site responsible for client coordination based on federation workflows. There can be one or more FL Servers for each project.

FL Client

An application running on a client site that responds to Server’s task assignments and performs learning actions based on its local data.

User

A human that participates in the FL project.

Role

A role defines a type of users that have certain privileges of system operations. Each user is assigned a role in the project. There are four defined roles: Project Admin, Org Admin, Lead Researcher, and Member Researcher.

Project Admin Role

The Project Admin is responsible for provisioning the participants and coordinating personnel from all sites for the project. When using the Dashboard UI, the Project Admin is the administrator for the site and is responsible for inputting the values to set up the project in the beginning and then approving the users and client sites while making edits if necessary.

The Project Admin is also responsible for the management of the FL Server.

There is only one Project Admin for each project.

Org Admin Role

This role is responsible for the management of the sites of his/her organization.

Lead Researcher Role

This role can be configured for increased privileges for an organization for a scientist who works with other researchers to ensure the success of the project.

Member Researcher Role

This role can be configured for another level of privileges a scientist who works with the Lead Researcher to make sure his/her site is properly prepared for the project.

Per-Study Role Override

When multi-study is configured (see Multi-Study Support), a user’s role can be overridden on a per-study basis through the studies: section of project.yml. For example, a user provisioned as org_admin can be assigned the lead role in one study and member in another. When the user logs in to a named study, the study-specific role is used for study-scoped authorization decisions during that session. The default study always uses the role from the user’s certificate.

FLARE Console (previously called Admin Client)

An console application running on a user’s machine that allows the user to perform NVFLARE system operations with a command line interface.

Provisioning Tool

The tool used by Project Admin to provision all participating sites and users of the project. The output of the Provisioning tool enables all participants (sites and users) to securely communicate with each other.