[provision-comment] Draft: Glossary of Terms for ProvisioningServices Technical Committee (PSTC)

Here is the First Draft of the Glossary of 
Terms for PSTC.  Please comment.

 

-Gavenraj Sodhi



  

Provisioning Services Technical 
Committee (PSTC)

Revision History

 

  
  

    
      
Version

    
      
Draft 01 – v01

  

    
      
Date

    
      
12 October 2001

  

    
      
Editor

    
      
Gavenraj 
      Sodhi

  

    
      
Comments

    
      
Glossary of Terms

 

Glossary of Terms for Provisioning 
Services Technical Committee (PSTC)

 

Account - A set 
of parameters that define a user’s access to a service. Every

service will require a different set of information to give a 
user

access; therefore, the parameters of accounts will differ by 
service

type.

Actor - An entity 
(i.e. person or system entity) utilizing provisioning, user

administration, services. Examples of actors include 
application programs, 

security services, any computing or non-computing services, 
etc. Perhaps actor 

is effectively synonymous with system or person entity.

Attributes – 
Functions of the particular resource.

Authorized - A 
system entity or actor is “authorized” if it is granted a right or a

permission or a capability to access a system resource.

Enterprise - 
Environment within the companies' realm (e.g., Intranet, current corporation 
employees, temporary employees, contractors).

External 
Enterprise - 
Environment which may contain many or all of the following:  Managed Services, contractors, temporary 
employees, multiple organizations, private to public registry systems.

Identity - Unique 
Identity or an element with respect to a defining domain (e.g., Organization or 
Party)

Organization - 
Organization of Persons.

Party - Refers to 
any person who interacts with the system and/or the

network the system is managing.

Person - 
Represents an individual person.

Provisioning - 
The self-service management of user identity data (e.g., identity, role) in a 
centralized manner to resources across an enterprise and external 
enterprise.  The resources may have 
attributes mapped across to multiple applications.  The attributes to these resources may 
consist of the following actions:  
Add, Modify, Delete, Suspend, Restore, Search, Notify, etc...

Requesting Authority 
- Party or system that is authorized to request a resource for the 
party.

Resource - Any 
application or service which can be managed for provisioning purposes.

Role - Roles that 
a person can fulfill within an organization

System - 
Represents computing entities (e.g., Provisioning System)

Service - A 
specific type of resource that is not physically obtained by a user,

but is accessed periodically by the user.

 

Other Initiatives to 
be considering:

 

DSML (Directory 
Services Markup Language) - An XML specification for marking up directory 
services information 

SAML (Security 
Assertions Markup Language) - An XML-based security standard for exchanging 
authentication and authorization information

XACML (eXtensible 
Access Control Markup Language) - An XML specification for expressing 
policies for information access over the Internet 

XNSORG (XNS Public 
Trust Organization) - An XML-based open platform for automated data exchange 
with global identity, privacy, and permission management capabilities

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Further definitions will come out when we start diving into 
use cases.

 

PSTCTerms.PDF