An affiliation specifies a person's relationship to the university in very broad terms. At any point in time, an individual may have no defined relationship, one defined relationship, or many defined relationships with the university, e.g. current faculty, former student, graduate/alumnus.

All EIDs are created without affiliations; affiliations are added and removed as appropriate. EID affiliations are managed by the affiliation sponsor departments.

A current list of affiliations is available in the TED Directory Schema.

Characteristics of an EID affiliation

An affiliation should be broad, distinguishable, unambiguous, and portable. An EID affiliation must represent an identifiable population of people with a relationship to the university that relates to the core mission of the University.

Broad

An EID affiliation should represent a significant number of people.

Examples: Current Students, Former Employees, Future Faculty.

Distinguishable

An EID affiliation should be clear and distinct from other affiliations. In other words, if a new affiliation can be confused with an existing affiliation, it should not exist.

Examples: Students/Prospective Students, Employee/Job Applicant, Faculty/Prospective Faculty.

Unambiguous

An EID affiliation should be self explanatory. If a detailed explanation is required to explain an affiliation, it is not an affiliation.

Examples: Visitor, Employee, Future Faculty, Student.

Portable

An EID affiliation should not be specific to the University of Texas business process. If you could not have the same affiliation at another university, it is not portable.

Examples: Student, Employee, Job Applicant, Prospective Student.

Identifiable population

It must be possible to determine every EID that has the affiliation.

Example: It is possible to identify the prospective students.

Relationship with the University

An EID affiliation represents EID with ties to the University.

Example: Current employees qualify as having a tie to the University.

Core mission of the University

A group of EIDs should not be granted an affiliation unless that relationship is central to the mission of the university.

Example: Providing library services is central to the University mission.