Integrated Directory Services Working Group
T. Genovese
Microsoft
Barbara Jennings
Sandia National Laboratory
11 November 1996
Expires: 10 May 1997
A Common Schema for the Internet White Pages Service
File Name: draft-ietf-ids-iwps-schema-spec-02.txt
Status of this Memo
This document is an Internet-Draft. Internet-Drafts are working
documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), it areas,
and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute
working documents as Internet-Drafts.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
material or to cite them other than as "work in progress".
To learn the current status of any Internet-Draft, please check the
"1id-abstracts.txt" listing contained in the Internet-Drafts
Shadow Directories on ds.internic.net (US East Coast), nic.nordu.net
(Europe), ftp.isi.edu (US West Coast), or munnari.oz.au (Pacific Rim).
Overview
The work is the result of the IETF Integrated Directory Services (IDS)
Working Group which proposes to establish a specification for a simple
Internet white pages service. To facilitate this effort it would be
helpful to have a common schema used by the various white page servers.
This document is designed to specify the basic set of attributes to be
used for a white page entry for an individual. This schema does not
describe how to represent other objects in the White page service.
It does describe how new objects can be defined and registered. This
schema is independent of implementations of the White Page service.
1.0 Introduction
The Internet community has stated that there is a need for the
development and deployment of a White Page service. This service
would be used to locate information about people in the Internet[PA94].
To facilitate interoperability and a common user expectation the
Internet White Pages Service (IWPS) needs to have a common set of
information about each person.
This Document will focus only on common information modeling issues to
which all IWPS providers must conform. To insure a consistent user
experience of this service we need to define a common user object. This
will allow a user to go between different implementations of the service
and have a consistent expectation as to what information can be found about
people on the Internet. Developers of this service need to have an
unambiguous method of representing the Information objects managed by
the service. This will help facilitate interoperability and data management.
2.0 Scope
This document will establish the set of attributes that specify the common
user information object for the IWPS. It will not attempt to be an
exhaustive specification of all objects that will be stored in the IWPS.
The process used by this document to define the user object will be used to
define all other information objects used in the IWPS.
This document will not specify rules with respect to information privacy.
Each country has its own set of laws and practices. Work covering
this area was done by North American Directory Forum (NADF) [NADF92]. In
this are recommendations for registrants rights for both the USA and Canada.
3.0 IWPS Schema Considerations
The information object description requirements for the IWPS
consists of the following:
1. Syntax for definition/representation of Information
Object Templates.
2. Registration procedures for information object
Templates, etc.
3. Database structure or schema.
Items 1 and 2 will be covered in this Document. Database structure
can potentially restrict implementations (i.e. X.500 schema based verses
DNS schema based) and will not be defined in this document. This area is
a separate Research topic and will be covered in its own document.
3.1 Syntax for Definition/Representation of Information objects
A clear, precise and consistent method must be used when information
object Templates and their associated attributes are discussed within
the context of IWPS. There are two possible methods to do this. i.e.
1. BNF
2. ASN.1
The Working Group has recommended the use of ASN.1. It provides us with
a set of defined attributes and encoding syntax's. Also, it is well
documented and widely available.
The use of ASN.1 to specify the attributes of the information objects does
not imply the use of Basic Encoding Rules (BER) for any IWPS servers
protocols. The use of Object inheritance is not used or specified by
this document. The IWP person object specifies a set of recommended
attributes that a White Page Service chould include. It suggests storage
sizes, but does not recommend storage types. How an implementation stores
the user attributes is a local issue. The Syntax listed with the attributes
are provided so the developers of user interfaces (UIs) may have a consistent
expectation. This document does not specify a Directory access protocol
(i.e. whoi++, LDAP, DAP, etc.) or how the UI is to display these attributes.
Attributes that contain textual information that must be split over multiple
lines (i.e. Postal address) will use the procedure defined in RFC 822 in
section 3.1.1 on "folding" long header lines [RFC-822].
For International localization it is recommended that attributes (except
email addresses) used to identify people must follow the
DirectoryString syntax defined by LDAP [LDAP-A].
3.2 Publishing of IWPS Information object Templates.
The Working Group recommends that all information object Templates
used for the IWPS be published as an RFC at the mimimum. To facilitate
distribution of IWPS information object Templates they should be made
available on the Internet information server (i.e. InterNIC).
Individual organizations may define information object Templates that
are only local in scope. This may be needed to meet local
organizational needs. All information that the organization wishes
to be part of the IWPS must use an IWPS published information object
Template.
4.0 Data Privacy
Each country and within the US, each state, has legislation defining
information privacy. The suggested attributes in Appendix may be
considered private and a directory administrator is stongly advised
to verify the privacy legislation for his domain.
As suggested in RFC 1355 (4) each Directory provider should provide a
clear statement of the purpose of the directory, the information that
will be contained in it, and a privacy policy associated with the
information that is stored within the directory. This policy should
include restrictions for data dissimenation.
This policy is strongly recommended for the US and Canada and required
for many counties in the European Community for data sharing.
5.0 Data Integrity
Data Integrity was first addressed in RFC1107 [KS89]. Which states,
that if the information is out of date it is useless and the service
will not be used. Therefore, a clear requirement is that any production
IWPS provider must insure that all data is reasonably correct and current.
To facilitate the user in determining the quality of the data that
has been retrieved it is recommended that the optional Ancillary
attributes of the IWPS person Template be supported. This would require
that the IWPS User Agent to be able to retrieve and display this
information. This may be done as a separate operation from the fetch
of the information object. The Ancillary Attributes are defined in
Appendix A. It is further recommended that any new information object
Template include as a minimum the Ancillary attributes as an optional
set of attributes. It would then be left to the IWPS servers to
optionally support the storage and retrieval of this data.
The Ancillary attributes have been designed to provide the following
information about the information object with which it is associated:
1. The date and time of the last modification.
2. Who performed the last modification.
3. Who owns or is responsible for the data stored
in the information object.
4. What is the official source of the data.
6.0 References
[LDAP-A] Wahl, M., Coulbeck, A., Howes, T., Kille, S., "Lightweight
Directory Access Protocol: Standard and Pilot Attribute Definitions",
Draft-ietf-asid-ldapv3-attributes-01.txt, June, 1996
[KS89] Sollins, K., "A Plan for Internet Directory Services", RFC
1107, Laboratory for Computer Science, MIT, July 1989.
[NADF92] North American Directory Forum, "User Bill of Rights for
entries and listings in the Public Directory', RFC 1295,
North American Directory Forum, January 1992.
[PA94] Postel, J., Anderson, C., "WHITE PAGES MEETING REPORT", RFC
1588, University of Southern California, February 1994.
[RFC-822] Crocker, D., "Standard for the Format of ARPA Internet
Text Messages", STD 11, RFC 822, August 1982.
8.0 Authors Address
Tony Genovese
The Microsoft Corporation
One Microsoft way
Redmond, Washington 98007
USA
Phone: (206) 703-0852
EMail: TonyG@Microsoft.com
Barbara Jennings
Sandia National Laboratories
Albuquerque, New Mexico 87106
USA
Phone: (505) 845-8554
EMail: jennings@sandia.gov
Appendix A Information Object Template Definitions
This appendix contains the IWPS Person Information Object Template
and its associated attributes. The Person Object is a simple list
of attributes, no structure or object inheritance is implied. All
size recommendations are in bytes.
The following size recommendations should be used as an indication
of the largest size of a particular attribute that an IWPS client
application would see in practice. In particular instances, actual
user attributes may be larger or smaller than these recommendations,
and applications should be written to accept any size attribute returned
from a server.
-- SPECIAL CONSIDERATIONS --
Phone number: should be the full international form
i.t. +1 206 703 0852. The field may contain
additional information following the phone
number. For example:
+1 800 sky page #123456
+1 882 8080 ext 30852
Email address: Is multivalued and uses the otherMailbox syntax
to identify the different email addresses.
Certificate: Is multivalued.
Common Name: Is multivalued.
-- THE INFORMATION OBJECT TEMPLATE FOR THE IWPS PERSON --
--General Attributes --
Field Name Size Syntax
Email 360 otherMailbox
Cert 4000 Certificate
Home Page 128 caseExactString
Common Name 64 DirectoryString
Given Name 48 DirectoryString
Surname 48 DirectoryString
Organization 64 DirectoryString
Locality 20 DirectoryString
Country 02 DirectoryString (ISO3166)
Language Spoken 02 DirectoryString (ISO 639)
--Personal Attributes
Telephone Number 30 PrintableString
Fax 30 PrintableString
Mobile Phone 30 PrintableString
Pager Number 30 PrintableString
Postal Address 255 PostalAddress
Bio 255 DirectoryString
--Organizational Attributes
Title 64 DirectoryString
Office Phone 30 PrintableString
Office Fax 30 PrintableString
Office Mobile Ph 30 PrintableString
Office Pager 30 PrintableString
Postal Address 255 PostalAddress
--Security
Password 64 Password
--Ancillary
Creation time 24 GeneralizedTime
Last Modified 24 GeneralizedTime
Creator Name 255 DN
Modifier Name 255 DN
Datatracker
draft-ietf-ids-iwps-schema-spec-02
Internet-Draft
