UW-Madison Stem and Group Naming Standards

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: