General

This part of ISO/IEC ISP 15126 profiles Directory System Schema information to be stored within the Directory. This is the information, common to a variety of applications, which the Directory itself needs to know in order to operate correctly. This information is specified in terms of subentries and operational attributes.

To support the implementation of the Directory as defined by IUT-T Rec. X.500-series | ISO/IEC 9594 edition 1993, this part of ISO/IEC ISP 15126 gives requirements that are applicable to implementations of Directory System Agents (DSAs). 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 concerning the management and storing of operational and administrative information. It does this by specifying for a conformant DSA a minimum set of requirements concerning the specific tree structure for operational information and the operational content of the entries and subentries.

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.

Therefore, contrary to ISO/IEC ISP 15126-1, this part of ISO/IEC ISP 15126 does not recommend Naming Authorities in any way not to restrict their selection of object classes or naming attributes for operational information 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.

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

Clause 6 deals with Name Forms and Structure Rules which may be used to constrain subentries belonging to a particular subtree. This is done by reference to and within the scope of ITU-T Rec. X.501 | ISO/IEC 9594-2. Subclause 7.1 deals with object classes for subentries. Subclauses 7.2 and 7.3 deal with operational attribute types, content rules for the directory system schema 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 “FDY12 - Directory data definitions - Directory system schema”.

Scenario

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