Party-to-Party Relationships

[This is prerelease documentation and is subject to change in future releases. Blank topics are included as placeholders.]

There are many Kinds of relationships between parties. For example, a Group membership is a relationship between a Group and another Party. The schema represents Group membership as a set of instances in the Party-to-Party Relationships Extent.

Context Party	Relationship Kind	ReferencedParty	DateRange
100 (AD Schema Group)	GroupMembership	24 (Kim Abercrombie)	January – now
100	GroupMembership	48 (AD Dev Leads)	January – now
100	GroupMembership	56 (Jeff Low)	January – now
100	GroupMembership	64 (David Ahs)	January – now
100	GroupManager	56 (Jeff Low)	March – now

The “Context” Party is a reference to the Party to which the member belongs. The “Referenced” Party is a reference to the Party that is a member. Multiple people (‘Kim’, ‘Jeff’ and ‘David’) have a GroupMembership in the Schema Group, but ‘AD Dev Leads’ – which is itself a group – can also have a membership. A group within a group because any Kind of Party can be related to any other Party.

Note

The Group instance referred to has a name (‘AD Schema Group), and the Person instance referred to has a name (for example, ‘Alain Lissoir’), but the individual relationship instances do not.

‘Friendship’ is another Party-to-Party Relationships, as is the ‘Fan’ or ‘BlogRoll’ relationship common in the blogging world, where community members can become fans of other bloggers. The ‘Fan’ relationship also demonstrates the characteristic of being directional (in the sense of not necessarily being reciprocated). Thus various Kinds of relationships can be thought of as being either unidirectional or bidirectional. ‘Family’ relationships and even ancestral trees are also Party-To-Party Relationships.

A Person can have a ‘Manager’ relationship to another Person. A Corporation may have a ‘Parent-Organization’ relationship to a Business Unit. Software Services can also have relationships to other Parties. A given instance of SharePoint can have a ‘HomePageService’ relationship to a given Person. To find the Home Page service of a given Person instance, one must locate the right Person instance and follow the relationship instance. The same instance of SharePoint might additionally have an ‘Administrator’ relationship to both a Group and several individual People. Similarly there are relationships of various kinds that exist between People and Unified Communication Services, file Services and PC Devices.

Sometimes people want to specify that a relationship is not just with a particular Party, but with a specific aspect of that Party. Take the example of setting up a Group of Friends to whom personal information is sent. A user might want mail that is sent to some individuals to go to their personal email addresses, not job-related ones.

Specific Aspects of Parties

To accommodate specific aspects of Parties, the schema allows relationships to be made more specific by including a ReferencedPartyIdentityKey and ContextPartyIdentityKey. IdentityKeys are used to store email addresses and other identifiers.

Context Party	Relationship Kind	ReferencedParty	ReferencedPartyIdentityKey
100	GroupMembership	24	1023 Email: kimabercrombie@adatum.com
100	GroupMembership	48
100	GroupMembership	56	299 Email: Jefflow@adatum.com
100	GroupMembership	64

This distinction turns out to be important; it differentiates between basic Party-To-Party Relationships, which do not use instance names and Roles, which do normally have instance names or identifiers. The same mechanism can be used to describe relationships with non-local entities (for example, with a Person described in a different directory instance).

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