eduPersonPrimaryAffiliation

A short description

Specifies the person's primary relationship to the institution in broad categories such as student, faculty, staff, alum, etc.

Usage

Utility class
[ Core | Standard | Extended ]
Basic applications like white pages and some authorization data.

Is attribute required?
Optional. Application selects whether it will support attribute or not.

Confidentiality
Low. Data well known from other sources.

Integrity
Medium. Values should be up to date.

Availability
Medium. If the LDAP uses this attribute, it should normally be provided for relevant objects. Authorization may fail if no value is available.

Details

Multiple values?
Single value

Value format
DirectoryString

Attribute origin
eduPerson

LDAP

OID

1.3.6.1.4.1.5923.1.1.1.5

Datatype

DirectoryString

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Allowed values: faculty, student, staff, alum, member, affiliate, employee
Appropriate if the person carries at least one of the defined eduPersonAffiliations. The choices of values are the same as for that attribute. Think of this as the affiliation one might put on the name tag if this person were to attend a general institutional social gathering. Note that the single-valued eduPersonPrimaryAffiliation attribute assigns each person in the directory into one and only one category of affiliation. There are application scenarios where this would be useful.

The list of allowed values in the current version of the object class is CERTAINLY incomplete. We felt that any additional values should come out of discussions with the stakeholder communities. Any agreed-upon additional values will be included as part of future versions of eduPerson.

We also deliberately avoided including a value such as "other" or "misc" because it is semantically equivalent to "none of the above." To indicate "none of the above," for a specific person, leave the attribute unpopulated. "Member" is intended to include faculty, staff, student, and other persons granted a basic set of privileges that go with membership in the university community (e.g., library privileges). It could be glossed as "member in good standing of the university community."
"Affiliate" is intended to apply to people with whom the university has dealings, but to whom no general set of "community membership" privileges are extended.

Semantics

Each institution decides the criteria for membership in each affiliation classification.
A reasonable person should find the listed relationships commonsensical.

Feide usage notes

The source is the institution's employee and student management systems. It is not readily apparent that it will be possible to agree on an algorithm to determine which of a person's affiliations is the primary affiliation. This raises little or no dangers from a privacy viewpoint.

Example applications for which this attribute would be useful:

Controlling access to resources.