OASIS Open

This proposed revision is a proposed update to address the issue described as "Severe Error of omission in description of Hierarchical Profile ancestor collection algorithms" raised in this email: http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/xacml/200902/msg00055.html
and this proposed update contains the proposed resolution as described in that email.
This proposed revision is listed as WD-05, however, it is a direct update to WD-03, and the changes highlighted reflect that. The earlier preliminary proposed revision, WD-04 (email: 31-Jan-09), may be regarded as obsolete, and because of the discussions that have occurred since that time on this issue in the emails, it was considered more sensible to make the changes directly from WD-03, rather than rework WD-04.
As has been discussed throughout the handling of this issue, there are no functional changes contained in WD-05, it simply expresses functionality that already exists in WD-03 (and provides 2 optional identifiers to explicitly identify the functionality as an alternative to have the functionality implicit thru the lack of other identifiers), but that is only partially explained, which results in it effectively not being explained at all. Because this functionality is of critical importance in terms of deciding how to write policies for hierarchical resources, it is considered essential to include the functionality in the Profile in a manner that is readily apparent so that users of the spec are aware of its existence and can make informed decisions whether to use it or not.