RE: [provision] Organizations and Targets...

["Gary Cole" <Gary.Cole@waveset.com>]

This seems okay to me; I'm not opposed to the notion of Container
classes.  However, I want to ask a couple of questions.

1) A Target wouldn't be *just* a container, would it?  It'll still be
"special", won't it?  I understand that a Target contains provisioned
objects, but target is not itself a provisioned object.  The other
things we're talking about (like Organizations) would be provisioned
objects.  My concern here is that modeling a target as a container has
the potential to be confusing (if target is not clearly distinguished
from provisioned object).

2) Expressing containment alone (e.g., for an Organization) doesn't
convey any information that couldn't be expressed by reference (of the
provisioned object(s) to the container).  What advantage do you see in
modeling an Organization as "just" a container?  Is the idea that
containment would be the only aspect of organization that is specified,
and the rest is left open to the vendor/implementer/extender?  Or do we
still think that we'd want to model other aspects of these object
classes?  

Gary

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jeff Bohren [mailto:jbohren@opennetwork.com] 
> Sent: Thursday, March 25, 2004 1:25 PM
> To: provision@lists.oasis-open.org
> Subject: [provision] Organizations and Targets...
> 
> 
> In provisioning an "Organization" may mean different things. 
> The term is used to mean a company, but is also used to main 
> an hierarchical structure (although sometimes the term  
> organizational unit is often used for that). For the purpose 
> of this discussion I will use the term organization to mean 
> hierarchical structure.
>  
> For provisioned objects that are two ways in which 
> organizational membership can be expressed; by containment 
> and by reference. Both concepts can be supported implicitly 
> in SPML 1.0. To support the concepts explicitly in SPML 2.0 
> two elements are needed; the notion of an explicit container 
> and the notion of an explicit reference to an organization. 
> If organizations are themselves PSOs, then a PSO-ID as a 
> reference could be used to represent the reference to the 
> organization, and the PSO itself could be the container.
>  
> So all this is needed for explicit support of organizations is:
>  
> 1) PSO Container - semantics indicating that a PSO contains other PSOs
> 2) PSO Reference - one PSO having a refernce to another PSO 
> (note that this is already a requirement for SPML 2.0)
>  
> If these concepts are added to support organizations, they 
> could also be used to support targets as well. Targets are in 
> essence PSO containers. Both organizations (when indicated by 
> containment instead of reference) and targets could be 
> represented by PSOs that explicitly contain other PSOs.
>  
> Jeff Bohren
> OpenNetwork Technologies
>