T. Genovese
Microsoft
Barbara Jennings
Sandia National Laboratory
10 January 1997
Expires: July 1997
A Common Schema for the Internet White Pages Service
File Name: draft-ietf-ids-iwps-schema-spec-03.txt
Status of this Memo
This document is an Internet-Draft. Internet-Drafts are working
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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. It describes how new
objects can be defined and registered. This schema is independent of
specific implementations of the White Page service.
This document does not describe how to represent other objects in the
White page service. Further it does not address the search/sort expectations
within a particular 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.
All conforming implementations must support at the minimum, the core
attributes listed in Appendix A. Implementations may include additional
local attributes and be considered in conformance as long as they support
the core set of attributes.
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 BNF. BNF is widely used by
the Internet community and is well understood. It is used by the
LDAP work on attribute definitions. This document makes use of the
previously defined syntaxes use by LDAP. They are included in Appendix
B for convenience.
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 should include. This draft suggests storage sizes,
but does not recommend storage types. Storage of 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 A may be
considered private and the 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.
Ancillary attributes have been included which state the source of origin
and the current party responsible for the data in addition to date;
such that the owner and the freshness of the data can be easily determined.
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 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 the entry was created; Creation Date.
2. Owner or individual responsible for the data creation;
Creator Name.
3. The date and time of the last modification;
Modified Date.
4. Individual responsible forthe last modification;
Modifier Name.
6.0 References
[Davis] M. Davis, UTF-8, (WG2 N1036) DAM for ISO/IEC 10646-1.
[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.
[UCS] Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set (UCS) - Architecture
and Basic Multilingual Plane, ISO/IEC 10646-1 : 1993.
7.0 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: the full international form is recommended;
i.e. +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 URI
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
Description 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 Date 24 GeneralizedTime
Creator Name 255 URI
Modified Date 24 GeneralizedTime
Modifier Name 255 URI
Appendix B IWPS Person Information Object Template Syntaxes
This Appendix contains the definitions of the syntaxes used by the
IWPS Person Information Object Template. They are copied in whole
from the LDAP attribute working document. Some modification to the
LDAP attribute text was done for completeness.
Certificate:
Do to differences from version X.509(1988) and X.509(1993) and additional
changes to the ASN.1 definition to support certificate extensions, no
string representation is defined, and values with Certificate syntax
must only be transferred using the binary encoding, by requesting or
returning the attributes with descriptions "userCertificate;binary" or
"caCertificate;binary". The BNF notation in RFC 1778 for
"User Certificate" is not recommended to be used.
DirectoryString:
A string with DirectoryString syntax is encoded in the UTF-8 form of
ISO 10646 (a superset of Unicode). Servers and clients must be prepared to
receive arbitrary Unicode characters in values.
For characters in the PrintableString form, the value is encoded as the
string value itself.
If it is of the TeletexString form, then the characters are transliterated
to their equivalents in UniversalString, and encoded in UTF-8 [Davis].
If it is of the UniversalString or BMPString forms [UCS], UTF-8 is used to
encode them.
Note: the form of DirectoryString is not indicated in protocol unless the
attribute value is carried in binary. Servers which convert to DAP must
choose an appropriate form. Servers must not reject values merely because
they contain legal Unicode characters outside of the range of printable
ASCII.
GeneralizedTime:
Values of this syntax are encoded as printable strings, represented
as specified in X.208. Note that the time zone must be specified.
It is strongly recommended that Zulu time zone be used. For example,
199412161032Z
OtherMailbox:
Values of the OtherMailbox syntax are encoded according to the
following BNF:
<otherMailbox> ::= <mailbox-type> '$' <mailbox>
<mailbox-type> ::= an encoded Printable String
<mailbox> ::= an encoded IA5 String
In the above, <mailbox-type> represents the type of mail system in
which the mailbox resides, for example "MCIMail"; and <mailbox> is the
actual mailbox in the mail system defined by <mailbox-type>.
Password:
Values with Password syntax are encoded as octet strings.
PostalAddress:
Values with the PostalAddress syntax are encoded according to the
following BNF:
<postal-address> ::= <dstring> | <dstring> '$' <postal-address>
In the above, each <dstring> component of a postal address value is
encoded as a value of type DirectoryString syntax. Backslashes and
dollar characters, if they occur in the component, are quoted as
follows:
A backslash quoting mechanism is used to encode symbol character
such as ''', '$' or '#'. The backslash is followed by a pair of
hexadecimal digits representing the next character. A backslash
itself in the string which forms part of a larger syntax is
always transmitted as '\5C' or '\5c'.
PrintableString:
The encoding of a value with PrintableString syntax is the string
value itself. PrintableString is limited to the characters in
production <p>. Where production <p> is discribed by the following
BNF:
<a> ::= 'a' | 'b' | 'c' | 'd' | 'e' | 'f' | 'g' | 'h' | 'i' |
'j' | 'k' | 'l' | 'm' | 'n' | 'o' | 'p' | 'q' | 'r' |
's' | 't' | 'u' | 'v' | 'w' | 'x' | 'y' | 'z' | 'A' |
'B' | 'C' | 'D' | 'E' | 'F' | 'G' | 'H' | 'I' | 'J' |
'K' | 'L' | 'M' | 'N' | 'O' | 'P' | 'Q' | 'R' | 'S' |
'T' | 'U' | 'V' | 'W' | 'X' | 'Y' | 'Z'
<d> ::= '0' | '1' | '2' | '3' | '4' | '5' | '6' | '7' | '8' | '9'
<p> ::= <a> | <d> | ''' | '(' | ')' | '+' | ',' | '-' | '.' |
'/' | ':' | '?' | ' '
Datatracker
draft-ietf-ids-iwps-schema-spec-03
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