Subject: WG Review: Common Name Resolution Protocol (cnrp)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 1999 14:13:16 -0400

A new IETF working group has been proposed in the Applications Area.
The IESG has not made any determination as yet. 

The following Description was submitted, and is provided for
informational purposes only:

Common Name Resolution Protocol (cnrp)
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Description of Working Group:
 
For the purposes of this working group, a "common name" is a word
or a phrase, without imposed syntactic structure, that may be
associated with a resource.  These common names are expected to
be used primarily by humans (as opposed to machine agents).  A common
name "resolution service" handles these associations between common
names and data (resources, information about resources, pointers to
locations, etc).  A single common name may be associated with different
data records, and more than one resolution service is expected to exist.
Any common name may be used in any resolution service.  Common
names are not URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) in that they
lack the syntactic structure imposed by URIs; furthermore, unlike
URNs, there is no requirement of uniqueness or persistence of the
association between a common name and a resource.

The working group will define a protocol for the parameterized
resolution necessary to make common names useful.  "Resolution" is
defined as the retrieval of data associated (a priori) with descriptors
that match the input request.  "Parameterized" means the ability to
have a multi-component descriptor.  Descriptors are not required to
provide unique identification, therefore 0 or more records may be
returned to meet a specific input query.

Specific design considerations include

o ensuring applicability across languages and charactersets
  ("I18N")

o support for federated services:  query referral

o facilitating interoperability of CNRP services: e.g., providing
  base query parameters needed to support common name resolution,
  as well as the ability to introduce others (and standardize
  them)

o security:  authority, tracking origin of name

The protocol will define:

o client requests/server responses to identify the specific
  parameters accepted and/or required on input requests

o client request/server responses to identify properties to
  be returned in the result set
 
o expression of parameterized input query
 
o expression of result sets

o standard expression of error conditions

Deliverables:

o Document outlining the goals of common name resolution

o Document specificying a protocol for common name resolution

o Document defining a URI scheme for allowing common names to be 
  embedded in documents

Input documents:

draft-popp-cnrp-00.txt, "A resolution protocol for Common Name 
Namespaces", Nicolas Popp and Michael Mealling, February 1999.

draft-popp-cnrp-goals-00.txt, "Context and Goals for Common Name
Resolution", Larry Masinter, Michael Mealling, Nicolas Popp,
Karen Sollins, June 1999.