X.500/LDAP attributes and XED

["RL 'Bob' Morgan" <rlmorgan@washington.edu>]

As mentioned on last week's call, there is a large body of recent work
involving application of XML technology to X.500/LDAP-based directories.
The work overall is called "XML-Enabled Directory", XED, and is described
in a series of internet-drafts:

draft-legg-xed-roadmap-01.txt*
draft-legg-xed-dxer-00.txt*
draft-legg-xed-glue-00.txt*
draft-legg-xed-schema-00.txt*
draft-legg-xed-asd-00.txt*
draft-legg-xed-protocols-01.txt

In particular the dxer doc, whose abstract is:

   This document defines a set of Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1)
   encoding rules, called the Directory XML Encoding Rules or DXER, that
   produce an Extensible Markup Language (XML) representation for values
   of any given ASN.1 data type.

has some proposals that are likely to be relevant to my (and presumably
the TC's) interest in re-using X.500/LDAP attribute definitions in SAML
attribute assertions.  I haven't had a chance to review this in enough
detail to make an assessment about this, however.

I should note that this work is not any sort of standard or even an
accepted work item of an IETF WG.  There is related work going on in the
ITU as well, and suggestions that this work be conducted there.  So
incorporation of material from these docs, if appropriate, would be by
value, not by reference.

I think the DXER part of the XED proposal is consistent with the
requirements I expressed in my proposal to the TC about X.500/LDAP, though
obviously it is more ambitious.  Let me suggest that it would be
appropriate to draw from this material (with approval of the authors, with
whom I have discussed this briefly)  when working on a solution proposal
for this issue.

 - RL "Bob"