eduPerson

eduPerson is a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) schema designed to include widely-used person and organizational attributes in higher education. The eduPerson object class provides a common list of attributes and definitions, drawing on the existing standards in higher education. Related object classes include:

  • eduOrg

  • eduMember (The work of eduMember has concluded its activities for the present, and all work has migrated to the Grouper project.)

  • eduCourse (The eduCourseCourseID group has completed its work and is dormant at present. You may still find archival information and support in the wiki for MACE-Dir.)


Development of eduPerson was originally created and supported with funding from Internet2 and was formally transitioned to REFEDS for management on 15 October 2018.

As per the REFEDS Participant's Agreement, eduPerson is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Creative Commons License


eduPerson Release History


eduPerson LDIF files

Best Practices

  • No labels

5 Comments

  1. Is there not a way to have the LDIF files link to an actual Git repository (Atlassian BitBucket?), where one could inspect the files in browser, or could leverage git against the repo itself?

    1. I've added GH link on the LDIF files page but theres also a link to the LDIF file at the top of each eduPerson specification page for recent release

  2. I miss a reference to pairwise-ID in eduPerson schema. 

    Doc eduPerson 2021-11 mentions it as ePTID replacement and eduPerson 2021-11 minus SAML bits removes all of that.

    I realize pairwise-ID isn't part of the schema but their use fits together and not having them referred to from the same place complicates things.

    1. thanks for the feedback. we are looking to seperate the SAML-specific parts of the schema out to make the core schema clear with supporting SAML and OpenID docs as relevant. pairwise-id etc are purely SAML attributes and therefore not in the eduPerson schema itself.