uw-madison stem and group naming standards

Note that this page is out of date. Some information may be correct, but much of it is not. It will be updated soon to reflect current practices.

Namespaces and Delegation

For background on the issues, see the information from U Washington here and here

These rules were adopted in a team meeting on December 20, 2011. Any changes from here on out will need to follow formal change control process.

Namespace rules: 

1. Valid names:  any reasonably short string consisting of a sequence of characters chosen from the following classes:
   • lower- and upper-case letters a-z, A-Z
   • numerals 0-9, 
   • "-" (hyphen)
   • "."
2. Name component separator character:  colon, ":"
   • Recommended because it makes for more easily readable stem and group names and it is less likely than colon ":" to cause problems in scripts and modules.
3. Root stems: one of uw:* or u:* per specific rules below
4. Institutional (data-derived) groups: uw:ref:*
   • Note: Institutional groups are never used directly for authorization purposes, but always by inclusion in an appropriate authorization-related group
5. eduPersonAffiliations: uw:ref:institutional_roles:{faculty, staff, student, employee, member, alum, affiliate}
   • Note: Recommend use of eduPersonEntitlement: common-lib-terms in preference to eduPersonAffiliation: library-walk-in
6. Affiliations: uw:affiliation:*
7. (not implemented, yet) Courses (strictly speaking, course offerings): uw:course:*
8. Each *.wisc.edu or UW-related domain is welcome to a subdomain-tagged stem name: e.g. uw:domain:doit.wisc.edu, uw:domain:middleware.doit.wisc.edu, uw:domain:chtc.cs.wisc.edu, discovery.wisc.edu, morgridge.org, supportuw.org
9. Departments, Institutes, Centers and Divisions not covered by or overlapping with subdomain assignments: uw:org:*
10. (not implemented) NetID-based / personal groups u:netid:*
11. Miscellaneous or "stemless" groups: x:*
12. Mandated exceptions: Any valid name value not equal to any other predefined or pre-existing name
13. Group names are made globally unique by adding the following URN prefix:  urn:mace:wisc.edu:group: