Besides the IETF-standardized LDAP schemas (esp. COSINE, inetOrgPerson and Schema for User Application) the two attribute schemas predominantly used in academia are:

  • eduPerson, originally defined by MACE-Dir and now managed by REFEDS
  • SCHAC, originally defined by the TF-EMC² community and now managed by REFEDS

In both cases only a relatively small part of all defined attributes is of practical use in (inter-)federated scenarios.

eduPerson

"eduPerson is a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) schema designed to include widely-used person and organizational attributes in higher education. The eduPerson object class provides a common list of attributes and definitions, drawing on the existing standards in higher education."

SCHAC

SCHAC, the SCHema for ACademia, has defined attributes for all kinds of use-cases, with all kinds of syntaxes, controlled vocabularies, name and value registries, country naming authorities, etc.pp. Current releases of the specfication (as well as past ones) are available on the REFEDS wiki.

SCHAC suffers from a list of organizational, editorial and technical issues.

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