*MACE-Dir Conference Call*
June 9, 2003

*Participants*

Keith Hazelton -- Wisconsin (chair)
David Bantz -- Alaska
Brendan Bellina -- Notre Dame
Steven Carmody -- Brown
Renee Frost -- Michigan/Internet2
Ken Klingenstein -- Colorado/Internet2
Bob Morgan -- Washington
Todd Piket -- Michigan Tech
Art Vandenburg -- Georgia State
Nate Klingenstein -- Internet2 (scribe)

*Discussion*

International eduPerson

While eduPerson has had widespread domestic interest, there has also 
been considerable uptake of eduPerson by the international community.  
However, since eduPerson was not primarily designed to be an 
international object class, there are some issues: for example, all 
attributes and some values such as faculty and staff have 
America-centric names, and other difficulties persist.

There is now considerable interest in the multinational community in 
moving beyond this to a broader person object class that could be used 
for international collaboration.  Internet2 is willing to host a series 
of calls to discuss this new project as often as weekly; European 
collaboration will be present, especially through the conduit of Ingrid 
Melve of UNINETT.  [AI] Keith took an initial action item of getting 
pointers to various directory persons from various countries to begin 
putting together this effort.

The question would remain about what would happen to the existing 
eduPerson.  Many people saw eduPerson remaining as it is.  There is 
also a natural place here for an LDAP object class repository such as 
the project undertaken by Peter Gietz of DAASI International GmbH.

Process

Keith suggested that the easiest way to move forward on a difficult 
project like this is to begin by aggregating a bunch of interested 
parties from as many nations as possible and trying to agree on a list 
of "interesting" attributes.  Presuming this activity is successful and 
yields a sufficient list, the group could then move on to discussion of 
common syntax and semantics.  From there, there could be efforts on 
deciding which object classes these attributes should live in.

Another tough question is the proper scope for these object classes.  
Ton Verschuren of SURFnet has suggested that object classes probably 
exist at three levels: global object classes which can be deployed 
anywhere and contain the most general attributes, local object classes 
which support activities specific to the community the directory 
serves, and some level of aggregation or federation in between 
those extremes. It's not immediately obvious what level of aggregation 
would be appropriate for what this group produces.

*Action Item*

[AI] Keith will post a message to the list with pointers to various 
directory persons developed by various international organizations.