Thebes

The following pages contain some high-level example use cases. These examples are designed more to spark the imagination then serve as concrete formal descriptions of uses. In some cases, they are abstracted to the point of naivety.

The authors of this paper readily admit to freely admit to this, and present these pages anyway. Imagining the various possibilities open up discussion that can lead to development of the specific plug-ins and adapters to the general infrastructure that will allow rapid adoption of the infrastructure. It is hoped that wide adoption will open the door to interesting interactions between installations that cannot be predicted in advance.

While the Thebes infrastructure is open source and freely available, there will likely be developers working with various customers to write, test, install, and support custom adapters to Thebes. The publication of all standards used and code written will support and encourage this, and this will contribute to the expansion of the infrastructure. The Thebes consortium does not assert that it will attempt to satisfy these specific uses; these examples merely provide a blue sky to work in.

There are two different database models discussed. The least complicated model has a single database application installed in multiple locations. The structure is exactly the same in all installations, the only difference is the data contained at each installation. The example of this listed is the retail point of sale installation. The other model is one where the only thing the database installations have in common, aside from using Thebes’s infrastructure, is an enterprise vocabulary. In this case, every installation can be wildly different from all others, except when a data element is invoked it can be depended upon to be in exactly the same manner as any other installation. This is discussed as part of the medical research database example.

With these caveats in mind, the following use cases are examples that are presented to demonstrate some of the ways the Thebes infrastructure can impact the future of authentication, authorization, resource discovery, and policy control across a wide spectrum.