Lexicon

Terminology in the protocol spec

Terms are capitalized here for clarity of definition, but are lowercase in the main body of the specification for readability. Note that in this specification, the word "profile" is used not only to refer to [WRAP] profiles, but also for the result of choosing one out of several options in a referenced specification in order to increase interoperability.

Authorizing User: A web user who configures an Authorization Manager with policies that control how it makes access decisions when a Requester attempts to access a Protected Resource at a Host.

Authorization Manager (AM): An UMA-defined variant of a WRAP Authorization Server that carries out an Authorizing User's policies governing access to a Protected Resource.

Protected Resource: A resource (at a Host) whose access is restricted. (Note that this differs from WRAP's definition of the same term.)

Host: An UMA-defined variant of, respectively, a WRAP Protected Resource and WRAP Client, that enforces access to the Protected Resources it hosts, as decided by an Authorization Manager.

Token Validation URL: The URL at an Authorization Manager that a Host uses to validate an access token.

Claim: A statement (in the sense of IDCclaim). Claims are conveyed by a Requester on behalf of a Requesting Party to an Authorization Manager in an attempt to satisfy user policy. (Protected Resources may also contain Claims, but this is outside the view of the UMA protocol.)

Requester: An UMA-defined variant of a WRAP Client that seeks access to a Protected Resource.

Requesting Party: A web user, or a corporation (or other legal person), that uses a Requester to seek access to a Protected Resource.

Additional terminology

Terms in this section do not appear in the protocol spec, but we have found it to be useful to define them in addition, for non-normative/discussion purposes.

Primary Resource User: A web user who who interacts with a Host to store and manage Protected Resources there. The Primary Resource User may be identical to the Authorizing User of the same resource at that host, or they they may be different people.

UMAnitarian: An UMA WG participant.

UMAnize: To make a host UMA-protected. (Thanks to Domenico for that one.)

Discussion

(See the Law.com dictionary for some helpful definitions of legal terms.)

For our purposes in UMA 1.0, an authorizing user is always a natural person (a human being). By contrast, a requesting party may be a natural person (which we may think of as person-to-person sharing, such as "Alice to Bob" with the help of various online services in the middle), or it may be a legal person such as a company (which we may think of as person-to-service sharing because the service is run by a corporation or other organization, such as "Alice to a survey application run by InfoUSA").

It's possible, though unlikely in the typical case, that Bob will deploy an online service on his own behalf that manages the requesting of access to a resource of Alice's ("Alice to Bob's homegrown app"); in that case, it would be person-to-person just as in the first case. The nature of required claims could be different depending on which kind of sharing is taking place.

ISSUE: is this correct? Is this an equal option everywhere person-to-service is an option? In some cases, Alice herself will deploy an online service on her own behalf, for which it's convenient to set up a service-access relationship with some other service that Alice uses as a host. In this way, Alice can achieve person-to-self sharing ("Alice's calendar host to Alice's homegrown calendar subscription app"), which is akin to the type of data sharing and service access enabled by OAuth and WRAP with the addition of the centralized authorization manager component.

So a requester can act on behalf of several different types of requesting party, which differ in the type of profile that the requester (or rather its embedded WRAP client component) must use to request an access token from the AM (or rather from the AM's embedded WRAP authorization server component):

A claim may be affirmative, representing a statement of fact (as asserted by the requesting or another claim issuer); or promissory, a promise (as asserted by the requesting party specifically to the authorizing user). A statement of fact might be "The requesting party is over 18 years of age." A promise might be "The requesting party will adhere to the specific Creative Commons licensing terms indicated by the AM." There are technical dimensions to expressing and conveying claims, but since UMA strives to provide enforceability of resource-access agreements, there may also be legal dimensions.

In cases where a claim constitutes acceptance of an access-sharing contract offer made by the authorizing user (as presented by the AM as his or her agent in requiring the claim), the authorizing user and requesting party are the parties to the contract, and all other legal or natural persons running UMA-related services involved in managing such access are intermediaries that are not party to the contract (though they might end up being third-party beneficiaries in some cases).

Where the primary resource user and the authoring user differ, there is likely to be an interaction (invisible to UMA) at the host service that allows (or forces) the primary resource user to designate an authorizing user, and an agreement that the authorizing user acts as the primary resource user's agent or guardian or similar.

References

[RFC2119]
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt

[WRAP]
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-hardt-oauth-01

[hostmeta]
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-hammer-hostmeta

[IDCclaim]
http://wiki.idcommons.net/Claim