vCard KIND:device

Version 4 of the vCard specification defines a new "KIND" property to specify the type of entity that a vCard represents. During its work on the base vCard4 specification, the VCARDDAV Working Group defined values of "individual", "org", "group", and "location" for the KIND property. Additionally, has defined a value of "application" for the KIND property to represent software applications. During working group discussion of the document that became , consideration was given to defining a more general value of "thing", but it was decided to split "thing" into software applications and hardware devices and to define only the "application" value at that time. Since then, use cases for device vCards have emerged. These use cases involve using vCards as a primer for inventory and asset tracking data specific to network elements. Therefore, this document complements by defining a value of "device" for the KIND property to represent computing devices such as appliances, computers, or network elements. In this context, the concept of a device is constrained to computing devices and thus is distinct from purely mechanical devices such as elevators, electric generators, etc. that cannot communicate in any way over a network. This does not preclude, however, network-attached sensors that are connected to such mechanical devices.

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 . "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", and "NOT RECOMMENDED" are appropriate when valid exceptions to a general requirement are known to exist or appear to exist, and it is infeasible or impractical to enumerate all of them. However, they should not be interpreted as permitting implementors to fail to implement the general requirement when such failure would result in interoperability failure.

When the KIND property has a value of "device", the vCard represents a computing device such as an appliance, a computer, or a network element (e.g., a server, router, switch, printer, sensor, or phone). More formally, a "device" is functionally equivalent to the "device" object class used in the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol as derived from the Open Systems Interconnection model . However, whereas specifies that devices are "physical" elements, a device in this context can also be virtual such as a virtual machine running within another physical element. As one example of the "device" KIND, vCards can be embedded into devices at manufacturing time such that basic information such as serial number, support email, and documentation URL can be retrieved upon initial deployment. This vCard can be modified after the device is deployed to contain user-specified data about the device's characteristics. The vCard data can therefore be used for both asset tracking and operational purposes. A device might have a number of embedded vCards for varying purposes. The process for discovering and accessing these vCards is purposefully left unspecified in this document as this process could rely on any mechanism that makes sense for the device in question. For example, a device could have one or more of the following vCard instances: The device itself (e.g., the FN property might represent the hostname of a computing device, the URL property might represent a website that contains details on where to find documentation or get further information about the device, the KEY property might represent a digital certificate that was provisioned into the device at the time of manufacture , or a public key certificate previously provisioned into the device, and the ADR, GEO, and TZ properties might represent the physical address, geographical location, and timezone where the device is deployed). An organization or person that produces or manufactures the device. A person or role that maintains or administers the device. Application-level vCards as described in for each application installed on the device. When a device has vCards other than its KIND:device vCard, those vCards can be linked together with RELATED (see the definition of the RELATED organizational property in Section 6.6.6 of ). In multi-vCard instances the KIND:device vCard would use the RELATED property to express the relationship with the ancillary vCard(s). Those supplementary vCards need not use RELATED to point back to the KIND:device vCard. In this manner, the vCard for the device itself can be easily distinguished from vCards referring to the vendor organization, device administrator, and installed applications. The following base properties make sense for vCards that represent devices (this list is not exhaustive, and other properties might be applicable as well): ADR EMAIL FN GEO IMPP KEY KIND LANG LOGO NOTE ORG PHOTO RELATED REV SOURCE TEL TZ UID URL Although it might be desirable to define a more fine-grained taxonomy of devices (e.g., a KIND of "device" with a subtype of "router" or "computer"), such a taxonomy is out of scope for this document.

The following is an example of a router device that contains both manufacturing details as well as post-deployment attributes and uses the XML representation of vCard (xCard) described in . This vCard points to another, related vCard that contains the details of an administrative contact for the device. This vCard also leverages the extensibility of the xCard format to reference additional namespaces in order to provide richer details about the given device (e.g., the serial number and software version are specified as xCard extensions).

device x-model-name RTR1001 core-rtr-1.example.net http://www.example.com/support/index.html support@example.com x-local-support network-support@example.net xmpp:core-rtr-1@example.net contact urn:uuid:5CEF1870-0326-11E2-A21F-0800200C9A66 http://www.example.com/images/logo.png geo:35.82,-78.64 America/New_York 20120104T213000Z urn:uuid:00CCFB88-155F-40F6-B9D9-B04D134860C0

FTX1234ABCD

x-contract-number 1234567 00-00-5E-00-00-01 2.1.5 ]]>

The IANA is requested to add "device" to the registry of property values for vCard4. In conformance with Section 10.2.6 of , the registration is as follows, where the reference is to RFC&rfc.number;. device The entity represented by the vCard is a computing device such as an appliance, computer, or network element. This value can be used with the "KIND" property. See Section 3 of RFC&rfc.number;. [[NOTE TO RFC EDITOR: Please change &rfc.number; to the number assigned to this specification, and remove this paragraph on publication.]]

Use of vCards to represent devices is not envisioned to introduce security considerations beyond those specified for vCards in general as described in .