SCHAC - SCHema for ACademia

SCHAC Objectives

The need of interoperability among different components and the need of exchanging information outside institutional and sometime outside national boundaries have increased awareness of the role that attributes play.

The SChema for Academia, SCHAC, is the result of the work carried out in the area of attributes coordination to address inter-institutional data exchange, recognised by the TF-EMC2 group as a real need.

SCHAC aims to define and promote common schemas in the field of higher education to facilitate inter-institutional data exchange.

SCHAC is a collection of schemas that aim to facilitate interoperability among those institutions that decide to use them. SCHAC does not aim to replace the national schemas, but rather it aims to provide a common framework on top of the various national schema.

SCHAC Individual Attributes specification

The first release of "SCHAC Individual Attributes Specification" was issued in May 2006. The release defines a set of attributes to describe individuals in the academic and research institutions and contains an appropriate LDAP profile in appendix. The current SCHAC release, published in April 2015, as well as previous releases and proposed updates, can be downloaded from the download page

How to contribute to SCHAC

SCHAC schema is updated anytime proposals for updates are agreed by the SCHAC community.

If you have use-cases for new SCHAC attributes or you would like to suggest changes to the current SCHAC attributes, the best way to do that is to send emails to the schema-discuss mailing list.

Proposals for changes are discussed on the SCHAC mailing list for community feedback and approved by the Schema Editorial Board. If consensus is reached on a proposed change, then the new attributes or the updated attributes are added to the SCHAC schema on the next new release.