Subject’s role at their home organisation in broad categories such as staff, student.

Multi-valued with a controlled vocabulary — only the following affiliations are accepted:

• alum
• affiliate
• employee (implies member)
• faculty (implies employee, member)
• library-walk-in
• member
• staff (implies employee, member)
• student (implies member)

• eduPerson
• ePSA usage comparison
• HEMIS Data Elements

• member
• employee
• staff
• alum

The above example would represent a person who is currently an administrative staff member and who is also an alumnus of the institution.

The semantics of various affiliations is described in bold in the ePSA usage comparison.

For South African universities, these should be interpreted so as to align with the Higher Education Management Information System (HEMIS) data elements. Thus the eduPersonAffiliation definitions of “student”, “faculty” & “staff” should be aligned with the HEMIS definitions for “enrolled student” (both undergraduate and postgraduate) and the “instruction/research professional (academic)”, and “executive/administrative/managerial professional + specialised/support professional + technical + non-professional administration (senior management, administrative & support staff)” personnel categories respectively. Staff in the “trade/craft + service” HEMIS personnel categories would typically only be an eduPersonAffilliation “employee” (however depending on institutional policy they may additionally classify as “staff”.

Note that where an affiliation value above says “implies…” the implied values must also be included in the returned set. The most significant/primary one from the set can then be returned separately as eduPersonPrimaryAffiliation.

The non-normative diagram below shows how the implied values result in nesting such that the outermost value implicitly includes all of the inner ones.