Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)
To understand Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) you must first understand directory services. This article defines directory services and how LDAP structures the entries in a directory service. Pay attention to the basic LDAP components such as attributes, entries, and data information trees (DITs). How does LDAP organize data, and what is LDAP inheritance? Note that there are some variations in LDAP protocols.
LDAP Inheritance
Attribute Inheritance
In a similar way, attributes themselves can list a parent attribute during their definition. The attribute will then inherit the properties that were set in the parent attribute.
This is often used for making more specific versions of a general attribute. For instance, a surname is a type of name and can use all of the same methods to compare and check for equality. It can inherit these qualities to get the general form of a "name" attribute. In fact, the actual surname definition may contain little more than a pointer back to the parent attribute.
This is useful because it allows for the creation of a specific attribute that is useful for people interpreting the element, even when its general form remains unchanged. The inheritance of the surname attribute we discussed here
helps people distinguish between a surname and a more general name, but other than the value's meaning, there is little difference between a surname and name to the LDAP system.