  The main purpose of the present paper is to lay the foundations of
generalizing the AdS/CFT (holography) idea beyond the conformal setting. The
main tool is to find suitable realizations of the bulk and boundary via group
theory. We use all ten families of classical real semisimple Lie groups $G$ and
Lie algebras $\cal G$. For this are used several group and algebra
decompositions: the global Iwasawa decomposition and the local Bruhat and
Sekiguchi-like decomposititions. The same analysis is applied to the
exceptional real semisimple Lie algebras.
