Providing multiple external views on directory user interfaces

Abstract

Although there are many types of Directory User Interfaces they all tend to give to their users the same global view of the Directory. However, a typical user will only be interested in some portion of the total Directory database. Providing such specific view might be done for instance by restricting the default DUA display to a subset of object classes or attribute types meaningful to a particular application. The work described in this paper is not about interface styles or user friendliness. It is about defining mechanisms that allow for users to easily setup several configurations based on the information they intend to access. They should be adaptable to a variety of interfaces and, to demonstrate that, as well as raising some practical implementation issues, two interfaces based on these concepts are presented: A windows LDAP DUA and a WWW to X.500 gateway. Directory interfaces adopting this model are expected to help users make more advanced uses of the Directory and at the same time not need such a good knowledge of X.500 and its operations.