To: minutes@CNRI.Reston.VA.US From: conklin@info.cren.net (Jim Conklin) Subject: Minutes of the URI WG meeting of 18 July 1995 Date: Thu, 3 Aug 1995 17:31:20 +0100 Message-Id: <199508032128.RAA26992@info.cren.net> Sender: owner-uri@bunyip.com Minutes of the URI Working Group meeting held Tuesday 18 July, 1995 I. SUMMARY OF THE MEETING A. The minutes of last meeting were approved without dissent. B. 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, though some are captured later in these notes. 1. Leslie Daigle presented an overview of the SILK-based URA and metadata resolver developed at Bunyip. 2. Karen Sollins summarized her perspectives on URN resolution standards and services. 3. Keith Moore reviewed the key aspects of the resolution server developed at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. 4. Dirk van Gulik highlighted the Harvester search and resolver tool developed at the Center for Earth Observation. 5. 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. 6. Ron Daniels provided a brief update on the URC drafts and work needed to complete them. 7. Related IETF sessions were highlighted: the "Read the Label BOF on Wednesday afternoon, the unofficial Tuesday afternoon BOF on meta-data, and the Tuesday evening MIME registration session. B. The remainder of the meeting was devoted to a discussion of the Working Group's Charter. 1. John Klensin started this discussion, as Area Director responsible. He noted that the WG 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 WG 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 WG. 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's 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. 2. 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 WG. This began with a quick review of the text defining the work of the WG, 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: a. WG action on the URN syntax drafts should be moved ahead and accomplished by (1) an interim report comparing the various URN proposals (based on work already distributed to the WG) and recomending action, with either a proposed standard for a unified, general URN syntax to be adopted by the WG at the October IETF or agreement to allow separate, competing proposals for URNs to proceed independently. b. A similar approach should be followed for URCs, though specifics were not determined. c. Revision of RFC 1738 will be postponed until after the WG action on URN syntax. (A new date was not agreed upon for this.) d. Revision of RFC 1736 will not be done by this WG. Instead, a new WG to be formed specifically for the purpose of determining procedures for IANA acceptance of new URNs for registration. This WG 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. e. The WG needs to reach consensus on the finger and mailserver URLs in order for them to move forward. This should be done quickly. f. Leslie Daigle, Chris Weider, and a third person agreed to complete a draft informational RFC on Uniform Resource Architecture for discussion in December 1995. g. Klensin announced that an additional URI session could be scheduled for Thursday afternoon and used to continue the revision of the WG charter and possibly action on the finger and mailserver URL proposals. (It was thereafter announced as "UR - Next generation" BOF, 1300-1500, Carl Larsson Room.) ====================================================================== Note: At the subsequent URNG BOF, the URI WG was closed and proposals were made for several new working groups to carry on the work. A report of this action will appear in the Area Director's report to the IETF. ====================================================================== II. 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 & intermediate positions about what to standardize regarding name assignment and resolution. She noted that resolution services must be designed to accomodate 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 volitility of the information being located, policy controls, pricing, etc. Karen suggested that client development repesents 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 stabiltiy in the client interface to resolution services, modularity, and independence of service implementation. Karen concludes from these ideas that we should: standardize on client-service protocols standardize on the form of URNs (needed quickly!) standardize on how client/application might learn about resolution service suggestions - meta-information not standardize on a single inter-server protocol (but perhaps write several server-server protocols, each of which might become standardized) Keith discussed the resolution server, "SONAR" server, which point to "best" resolver, and 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 doesn't really matter what URNs are, they're 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 The scribe for the WG session was Jim Conklin. ========================================================================== To: uri@bunyip.com From: conklin@info.cren.net (Jim Conklin) Subject: Minutes of the UR-NG BOF held 20 July, 1995 Cc: Larry Masinter Message-Id: <199507210816.EAA23572@info.cren.net> Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 10:17:14 +0100 Sender: owner-uri@bunyip.com Here are my impressions of what went on at the UR-NG BOF, to supplement Larry's messages for those of you who weren't present. I tried sending them out previously but mis-addressed them. Apologies. John Klensin began the meeting by polling the group on its familiarity with the finger and mail RFCs and the draft proposals for finger and mailserver URL specifications. Based on the (lack of) response from the group assembled, John determined that those present were not adequately informed to recommend acceptance of these drafts and stated that he'd gather special, temporary groups of knowledgeable people for review of these two proposals. Klensin went on to state that the URI chair (Larry Masinter) had failed to provide him with requested information, which constituted grounds for dismissal, and that the WG was being disbanded. Larry objected to this, explaining that he had not been able to provide the requested document at the time it was requested because he was in the process of actively revising it and the only copy he had was marked with revisions. He stated that he had promised to provide it to John as soon as possible. He then handed Klensin a copy of the document. John then opened the floor for proposals for future activities related to uniform resource identifiers, etc. Chris Weider proposed splitting the WG activities into two parts, one going to the IRTF, the other to a new IETF WG. Discussion ensued. Massinter proposed the following as future Working Group activities that should be considered. They are documented in detail in his mail of this afternoon to the WG. A. Finish URI work on URLs B. URC syntax and structure C. Information resolution D. URI status & relationsips of current proposals (modified in the meeting from Larry's initial version) E. Bibliographic resource description(s) Chris suggested that Larry's areas A and B (and C, I think) were parallel to his ideas about what should be done by IETF, and that he had some concerns about E. (I didn't catch his comments about D, and I'm not sure I heard him correctly on C.) Larry suggested that the URC syntax group should cover the registration mechanism in its activities. Chris agreed. Larry (I think) proposed that, in B, the syntax should be done first, followed by defining the mechanism for registration, and that the group not look at [extensions?], which is a "rathole". Masinter agreed. Moore questioned whether IETF should be doing E at all. Someone suggested that there's an enormous benefit from an greement on a general outline of a solution for resource description. [Discussion] Alvestrand focussed on the sequencing of these groups. Group A needs to follow B. C can't proceed until after syntax defined. [Massinter: C has to define syntax.] E should be started after B has concluded [Massinter disagrees]. [discussion] Moore questions the benefit of E, others disagree. Ron [?]: A start on the activities of group E exists within the SGML WG. Craig Sumerhill indicated that there are severar people from the library community who feel strongly that E is needed now and would be interested in working on it. Massinter called for interest in working on A. [Harald Alvestrand noted that an alternative procedure for vetting URLs could be simply that "URL standards must be standards-track". This seemed popular.] Weider suggested that A, B, and C are non-controversial and can proceed. Need chairs and critical mass of people, however. There were a couple of volunteers, more probably needed. Moore: issues with human- readability presumption of URCs, would like "syntax" changed to [?]. Group C: Massinter feels that his proposed charter and milestones are too vague to be adequate. Weider exoects to get generic syntax, interim report, and protocol for speaking to a URN as issues that they can resolve by Dec'95. He proposes narrowing the charter of C to these issues, and putting the others off to a later group. And that current URN resolution proposals go straight to experimental. [GET REVISIONS O MASSINTER'S REVISED PROPOSAL FROM HIM, AND INCLUDE] [WHO VOLUNTEERED TO BE CO-CHAIR?] Need to create real charter and milestones. Group D: Short term. Descriptive document of current situation. Is it really useful? Lots of interest in seeing the document written [Massinter], but does it need a WG? Perhaps best done by a small group of individuals, then proposed to Area Directors as Informational RFC. Craig Summerhill noted that CNI is working on a similar document, suggested possible joint authorship; Avrum[? a co-author] disagreed; no resolution at the meeting. Strike URAs from the goals for this group; they're really a separate issue. Group E: Stu Weibel (OCLC) volunteered to chair this group. Ron raised the concern about the need to address the caching and replication issue, and how to handle this. In the IRTF? Keith noted that he and Roxanne tried to write a charter and discovered that more research needs to be done first, thereby lending credance to the idea of making this an IRTF project. Seconded by others, with the suggestion that research already in progress can help this move along in a timely fashion. Weider indicated that he won't be satisfied with the IRTF groups he's proposing unless they're open and/or include considerable cross-fertilization. Klensin expressed his appreciation, especially to Larry, for not having been crucified (yet) and asked that we send whatever additional input we might care to provide to him or to Harald Alvastrand. Jim