Internet Info 1997 December/Internet_Info_CD-ROM_Walnut_Creek_December_1997.iso/ietf/uri/uri-minutes-95jul.txt

Text File | 1995-10-18 | 8KB | 186 lines

CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_


Reported by Jim Conklin/CREN

Minutes of the Uniform Resource Identifiers Working Group (URI)

The URI Working Group met on Tuesday, 18 July.  Minutes of the group's
last meeting were approved without dissent.


Reviews of Material


The majority of the meeting was devoted to reviews of material provided
electronically to the Working Group.  Specifics of these activities may
be found in the e-mail and Internet-Drafts which were the basis of the
presentations.  Some additional information is also captured later in
these notes.


   o Leslie Daigle presented an overview of the SILK-based URA and
     metadata resolver developed at Bunyip.

   o Karen Sollins summarized her perspectives on URN resolution
     standards and services.

   o Keith Moore reviewed the key aspects of the resolution server
     developed at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

   o Dirk van Gulik highlighted the Harvester search and resolver tool
     developed at the Center for Earth Observation.


There was a brief question and answer period as follow up to these
presentations, which included discussion on the distinction between URLs
and meta-data in general, and whether meta-data or actual documents
should be returned by a resolver or search engine.  The issue of
punctuation and character sets was raised but not pursued.  Pointers to
electronic sources of information and experimental tools were given.

Ron Daniels provided a brief update on the URC drafts and work needed to
complete them.

Related IETF sessions were highlighted:  the Read the Label BOF (RTL) on
Wednesday afternoon, the unofficial Tuesday afternoon BOF on meta-data,
and the Tuesday evening MIME registration session.



The URI Working Group Charter


The remainder of the meeting was devoted to a discussion of the Working
Group's charter.

John Klensin, as the responsible Area Director, started this discussion.
He noted that the working group had completed its original milestones
and had been troubled by lack of consensus and a tendency to ``solve''
problems by creating yet another new type of UR identifier to be
defined.  He suggested that the working group must reorganize itself,
use small-group interactions to achieve focus, and find appropriate
mechanisms for separating activities rather than reasons to add new work
to the working group.  Discussion was reasonably lively and included
concerns about coordination among multiple groups working on the various
activities that relate to UR*'s, the claim that there is working code
and rough consensus on URAs by those that need them, and a reminder that
the original URI charter was deliberately written very broadly.

This was followed by a charter review presented by Leslie Daigle and
based on the proposals for charter revision which she and Ron Daniel had
distributed electronically to the working group.  This began with a
quick review of the text defining the work of the working group, which,
by common consent, was not addressed in discussions in order to focus on
the Goals and Milestones section.  There was considerable discussion of
many aspects of the proposed Goals and Milestones, with the following
actions resulting therefrom:


   o Working group action on the URN syntax drafts should be moved ahead
     and accomplished by an interim report comparing the various URN
     proposals (based on work already distributed to the working group)
     and recommending action, with either a proposed standard for a
     unified, general URN syntax to be adopted by the working group at
     the December IETF or agreement to allow separate, competing
     proposals for URNs to proceed independently.

   o A similar approach should be followed for URCs, though specifics
     were not determined.

   o Revision of RFC 1738 will be postponed until after the working
     group action on URN syntax.  (A new date was not agreed upon for
     this.)

   o Revision of RFC 1736 will not be done by this working group.
     Instead, a new working group to be formed specifically for the
     purpose of determining procedures for IANA acceptance of new URNs
     for registration.  This working group will be tasked to revise
     RFC 1736 or create a new document for that purpose, and to revise
     RFC 1737 only if that appears necessary in order to accomplish its
     task.

   o The working group needs to reach consensus on the finger and
     mailserver URLs in order for them to move forward.  This should be
     done quickly.

   o Leslie Daigle, Chris Weider, and a third person agreed to complete
     a draft Informational RFC on Uniform Resource Architecture for
     discussion in December 1995.

   o Klensin announced that an additional URI session could be scheduled
     for Thursday afternoon and used to continue the revision of the
     working group charter and possibly action on the finger and
     mailserver URL proposals.  (It was thereafter announced as the UR:
     Next Generation BOF (URNG).)
     Note:  At the subsequent URNG BOF, the URI Working Group was closed
     and proposals were made for several new working groups to carry on
     the work.  A report of this action appears in the Applications Area
     Report.



Additional Information about the Presentations

Leslie's presentation on the SILK-based URA resolver noted that it is
designed to be used to create sophisticated user decision-making and
information presentation through use of the meta-data provided by URAs.
It is intended to simplify the invocation of URAs, to create new objects
through individually specified processing of meta-information and to
access multiple URNs in order to obtain the meta-data needed to satisfy
the users' needs, thereby going beyond the usual interaction of a client
with a single server.  It allows HTML display of information to be
bypassed in preference to a user's specifications.

Karen reviewed the ideas for ``URN Resolution Standards'' from her
Internet-Draft, including extremes and intermediate positions about what
to standardize regarding name assignment and resolution.  She noted that
resolution services must be designed to accommodate a wide variation in
requirements (locality vs.  ubiquity, wide variations in the speed
required for resolution, etc.)  depending on the nature of the data or
other object being retrieved, the availability and the validity of the
information being located, policy controls, pricing, etc.  Karen
suggested that client development represents the major cost for
retrieval services and that clients need to be able to use a large
variety of services and servers, which implies the need for stability in
the client interface to resolution services, modularity, and
independence of service implementation.  Karen concludes from these
ideas that we should:


   o Standardize on client-service protocols.

   o Standardize on the form of URNs.  (Needed quickly!)

   o Standardize on how client/application might learn about resolution
     service suggestions -- meta-information.

   o Not standardize on a single inter-server protocol (but perhaps
     write several server-to-server protocols, each of which might
     become standardized).


Keith discussed the resolution server, ``SONAR'' server, which point to
``best'' resolver, and the Web client which he and his colleagues are
developing.  They use LIFNs, make relative URLs work correctly, are
fast, and are available now for experimentation.  See:


     http://mobile.netlib.org


Dirk reviewed ``Harvester'', a ``search and choice'' tool.  He noted
that, from the perspective of Harvester, it does not really matter what
URNs are, they are just like a handle to point to metadata, unique keys
into databases.  His services are based on negotiation between client
and resolution service.  The URN looks like the X-DNS URN. Relevant URLs
for this work include:


     http://elect6.jrc.it/ dirux/alibrooker.html
     http://ewse.jrc.it/.
     http://www.ceo.org/.
     x-dns-2 on port 4500 @elect6.jrc.it