Internet Info 1997 December/Internet_Info_CD-ROM_Walnut_Creek_December_1997.iso/drafts/draft_ietf_i/draft-ietf-ids-iwps-schema-spec-03.txt

Text File | 1997-01-21 | 18KB | 424 lines

                                                      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
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.  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: [phone]
   EMail: [e-mail]

   Barbara Jennings
   Sandia National Laboratories
   Albuquerque, New Mexico 87106
   USA

   Phone:  [phone]
   EMail:  [e-mail]



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. [phone].  The field may contain
               additional information following the phone
               number.  For example:

                        +1 800 sky page #123456
                        [phone] 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> | ''' | '(' | ')' | '+' | ',' | '-' | '.' |
             '/' | ':' | '?' | ' '