We could even consider broadening our use of X.500 to, for example, act as a search engine for organisations World-Wide Web pages. Alternatively, a primarily X.500 based white pages directory could be enhanced by building an Index DSA which contained URLs to other types of organisational directory servers. The paper primarily takes a technical view of how we can provide useful services with X.500. However we should note that many directory service problems are not technical, but are legal or even moral issues. The legislative framework concerning making information about people available differs widely from country to country, and its stringency in some European countries has hampered development of a white pages service.
Moral issues concerning an individual's right to privacy are probably even more important.
While compliance with the law may be relatively straightforward judgements about the types of information that should be made available are harder to make. These issues become much more sensitive when we are trying to create services based on aggregating information from a number of directory servers, with the explicit purpose of making the information more readily searchable. It is not clear which services we will be able to provide even when we have technical solutions, be they X.500 or some alternatives. I have assumed throughout that access to information should be by X.500. However it should also be possible to access information by LDAP since LDAP closely follows the X.500 information model.