An heuristic approach to defining process and governance for entity categories

In an email to this group on 18 February 2012 and on a page on this site, Leif Johansson proposed the notion of a formal IANA registry for Entity Categories.  IANA registries must be defined in an IETF Internet-Draft that becomes the basis for a formal request to establish the registry.  One of the clear advantages of such an approach is that the Internet-Draft includes process and governance proposals as well as information on syntax, semantics and other formal features of the proposed registry.

If the MACE-Cat group were to adopt and operate by as many of the provisions of such an Internet-Draft as possible, then even without (or prior to) formal IANA registration we would have public, well-defined processes and policies.  The alternative would be to do the same definitional work, but not cast it as a proposed IANA registry. 

Leif had previously submitted an Internet-Draft for an IANA registry for level of assurance profiles. As he notes, that document could serve as the starting point for a draft entity category registry proposal.

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  1. Leif Johansson

    We may just want to wait on the registry-bit until we have a full attribute-registry running at IANA. At that time this becomes yet another attribute. For now we can just define the semantics of the attribute itself and not talk about how to list/discovery the possible values.