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- Applications Area
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- Director(s):
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- o Russ Hobby: rdhobby@ucdavis.edu
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- Area Summary reported by Russ Hobby/UC Davis
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- A new goal in the Applications Area is to move toward working groups
- being unified by guiding architectures. Toward this goal the start of
- two architectures have been defined. The first is an architecture to
- define workstation based teleconferencing. The second is a joint effort
- between the Applications Area and the User Services Area to create an
- Internet Information Architecture to define a system of protocols to
- allow support information organization, searching and retrieval.
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- Conference Control BOF (CONFCTRL)
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- An impromptu BOF on Conference Control (sometimes referred to as
- connection or configuration management) was held. Discussions were to
- understand how such a group might contribute to the remote conferencing
- architecture effort. It was agreed that there is a need for a a session
- layer control protocol to perform higher layer functions than the
- protocol proposed in the AVT Working Group. The beginnings of design
- criteria for this protocol were identified by determining which
- functions must be supported. Discussion also focused on the range and
- capabilities of various session types needing support, the list of
- outside services to which the protocol will interface, and short-term
- versus long-term functionality considerations.
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- NAPLPS Graphics and Character Sets as a MIME BOF (NAPMIME)
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- This BOF explored interest in the definition of a NAPLPS body part for
- MIME. There was a demonstration of an NAPLPS system showing how
- presentation graphics can be transmitted using low bandwidths.
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- Remote Conferencing BOF (REMCONF)
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- The Remote Conferencing BOF discussed an architecture for all aspects of
- workstation based teleconferencing. This includes things like video,
- audio, shared windows, session setup and management. A separate group
- was spawned off to focus on session configuration and management. This
- group will become a working group to continue guidance on the
- architecture.
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- Remote Mail Protocol BOF (REMMAIL)
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- The Remote Mail BOF discussed methods for end-user mail delivery and
- problems with current protocols such as POP and IMAP. The Group reached
- consensus on two areas of work for a possible working group. First is
- to standardize a protocol for central mail repository to work with
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- diskless clients. The second is the email support of laptops and other
- disconnected machines. Discussion of a working group Charter will be
- done on the ietf-remmail@umich.edu mailing list.
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- SMTP Extensions Working Group (SMTPEXT)
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- The SMTP Extensions Working Group came to closure on a set of documents
- that answers the concerns brought up from the Last Call of the previous
- documents. These new documents will soon be submitted by the Working
- Group for approval to be a Proposed Standard.
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- Network Database Working Group (NETDATA)
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- The Network Database Working Group discussed the proposal from SQL
- Access for doing OSI's RDA directly on a TCP/IP stack. Security was the
- main technical concern of the Group. However, a more significant hurtle
- may be the logistical and legal one of being able to put the ISO and
- X/Open specification on line to create a complete description of the
- overall protocol.
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- Network News Transport Protocol Working Group (NNTP)
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- The NNTP Working Group finished up work on the NNTP v2 document and went
- on to discuss the requirements for a Network News Reader Protocol (NNRP)
- that would serve between a news repository and a user agent. Questions
- came up about how NNRP will relate to mail protocols, how authentication
- can be done, how to do search mechanisms, and whether NNRP should be an
- extension of NNTP or be developed independently.
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- Telnet Working Group (TELNET)
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- The Telnet Working Group continued the work on authentication and
- encryption for Telnet sessions.
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- Internet Information Architecture
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- The Internet Information Architecture is a start to define a system of
- protocols to support of information organization, searching and
- retrieval. Four working groups have been created to address several
- parts of the overall goal. These working groups are:
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- o Networked Information Retrieval Working Group (NIR): is cataloging
- the types of information and information services that currently
- exist. This defines the starting point for work on the overall
- architecture.
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- o Universal Resource Identifiers Working Group (URI): is looking at
- ways to have unique identifiers for information objects on the
- Internet. This will allow a person to know that they have found a
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- particular object regardless of how the object is named locally.
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- o Integration of Internet Information Resources Working Group (IIIR):
- is looking at the various information search and retrieval
- protocols, such as Archie, Gopher, WAIS and others, and working
- toward a common protocol or set of protocols to standardize these
- functions.
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- o Whois and Network Information Lookup Service Working Group (WNILS):
- is looking at how to organize directory information that already
- exists in various WHOIS servers.
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