ISO/IEC ISP 15126-1:1999 PDF

General

This part of ISO/IEC ISP 15126 profiles information to be stored within the Directory which is common to a variety of applications. Information which is specific to certain applications may be profiled by other International Standardized Profiles.

The Directory has been designed to support multiple applications, drawn from a wide range of possibilities. The nature of the totality of applications supported will govern which objects are stored in the Directory. Applications may be very specific, such as the provision of distribution lists for electronic mail, or generic, such as an 'inter-personal communications directory' application. The Directory provides the opportunity to exploit commonalities among applications.

To support the implementation of the Directory as defined by the second edition of the IUT-T Rec. X.500-series (1993) | ISO/IEC 9594 (1995), this part of ISO/IEC ISP 15126 gives requirements that are applicable to implementations of Directory System Agents (DSAs) and Directory User Agents (DUAs). Additionally, these requirements may guide Directory users and administrative authorities in use of the Directory.

The primary objective of this part of ISO/IEC ISP 15126 is to define the minimum capabilities that DUAs and DSAs shall support. It does this by specifying a minimum set of requirements concerning the tree structure and the content of the entries for a conformant DSA.

This part of ISO/IEC ISP 15126 does not limit DSAs to these minimum capabilities - a DSA that complies with this part of ISO/IEC ISP 15126 and has no additional information handling (storage, retrieval and modification) capabilities may not be adequate for many purposes, and implementors are strongly encouraged to provide such additional capabilities.

Likewise, this part of ISO/IEC ISP 15126 does not limit Naming Authorities in any way, e.g., restrict their selection of object classes or naming attributes to those which are required to be supported by this part of ISO/IEC ISP 15126. Rather, it guarantees that selections made within the scope of this part of ISO/IEC ISP 15126 will be within the capabilities of DSAs compliant with this International Standardized Profile.

In addition, interworking between DSAs which comply with this part of ISO/IEC ISP 15126 will be greatly facilitated on this minimum basis.

Clause 6 specifies Name forms and DIT Structure rules which may be used to constrain entries belonging to a particular subtree. This is done by reference to and within the scope of ITU-T Rec. X.520 | ISO/IEC 9594-6 and ITU-T Rec. X.521 | ISO/IEC 9594-7. Subclause 7.1 deals with object classes which are common to multiple applications. Subclauses 7.2, 7.3, 7.4 and 7.5 deal with attribute types, DIT content rules, syntax checking and matching rules respectively.

The Directory Access Protocol (DAP) and the Directory System Protocol (DSP), as defined by ITU-T Rec. X.500 series | ISO/IEC 9594, can be used to access information stored in a Directory Information Base (DIB) fragment which is profiled by this part of ISO/IEC ISP 15126.

Position within the taxonomy

This part of ISO/IEC ISP 15126 is identified in ISO/IEC TR 10000-2 as “FDY11 - Directory data definitions - Common directory use (normal)”.

Scenario

A Directory user (e.g., an application-process), by means of its associated Directory User Agent DUA), obtains Directory information by accessing directly or indirectly one or more DSAs of the Directory (see figure 1).