Subject: [mmox] Work Items and Planning Documents for the MMOX BoF session (Draft Charter)

From: "Meadhbh Hamrick (Infinity)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2009 11:41:13 -0800

Dear Participants,

As we move forward, I thought it would be useful to have some  
documents to discuss.

First off... the objective for this list and for the meeting at the  
74th ietf in San Francisco is to a) gauge overall support for the idea  
of an IETF WG focused on virtual world interoperability and b)  
identify a few deliverables we should be working towards. In support  
of this objective, the following draft working group charter has been  
proposed. This is a copy of what you'll find on the IETF wiki at http://trac.tools.ietf.org/bof/trac/wiki/MmoxCharter 
  .

Draft Charter for MMOX Working Group

The following is a proposed draft charter for the MMO/Virtual World  
Interchange (MMOX) Working Group. It is important to understand that  
this is a _draft_ and the authors are currently seeking substantive  
input from the technical community.

The IETF is the right forum for this work because this work will have  
a close interaction with existing IETF RFCs and STDs, the IETF has a  
diversity of viewpoints and experience to ensure a successful  
protocol, and the IETF has a IPR policy suitable to creation of a  
viable vendor-neutral suite of standards. Therefore, we are requesting  
a BoF session at IETF 74 to agree on a working group charter.

Working Group Name:
Massively Multi-participant Online Technologies

Chairs:
Meadhbh S. Hamrick <[email-masked]>
David Lavine <[email-masked]>

Area and Area Directors:
Applications Area
Lisa Dussealt <[email-masked]>
Chris Newman <[email-masked]>

Responsible Area Director:
Lisa Dussealt <[email-masked]>

Mailing List:
[email-masked]

Description of Working Group:

Virtual Worlds and other Massively Multi-Party Online Applications are  
of increasing interest to the internet community. Innumerable examples  
exist of such applications, most using proprietary protocols. With  
their roots in games and social interaction, Virtual Worlds are now  
being increasingly used in business, education and information  
exchange. With a user base expected to grow to beyond 50 million by  
2011, creators of such systems have begun to look at ways to make such  
systems interoperate. There have have been several ad hoc efforts  
since 2007 to develop interoperability. We believe the process would  
now benefit from a formal, established process.

The objective of the MMOX working group is to provide an application- 
layer wire protocol for Virtual Worlds to a) enable interoperability  
between applications, b) provide for access and exchange with other  
systems on the internet such as web services, e-mail and other  
information storage systems, c) allow network layers to recognize VW  
traffic and make routing decisions based on its characteristics.`

The core work of the group will be the production of the Open Grid  
Protocol suite (OGP), a set of application protocols to communicate   
and interact with the state of Virtual World applications.  
Foundational protocols in OGP include the publication of: 1) LLSD, an  
abstract type system for representing application layer objects along  
with serialization rules for protocol messages between these objects.  
2) OGP Base, a messaging abstraction to support the unique needs of VW  
interactions. 3) Guidelines for using a PKIX compliant X.509  
infrastructure to authenticate protocol endpoints. The OGP protocol  
suite makes use, where ever possible, of existing, established  
standards. For example, image data is typed and transfered using MIME  
and HTTP; serializations are encoded in XML and JSON.

The MMOX working group is not proposing the standardization of any one  
complete proprietary protocol, but the definition of a extensible core  
protocol and layers of agreed functionality as they are developed.  
Because the OGP suite is layered upon a core that is deployable before  
the entire range of VW functions is considered, we believe that the  
efforts of the MMOX working group are achievable within a reasonable  
time frame.

Goals and Milestones:

October 2009	Publication of LLSD Draft as an Informational RFC
October 2009	Publication of the PKIX Profile for Inter-Simulator  
Communicaton Draft as an Informational RFC
February 2010	Progression of OGP Base and Event Queue to Proposed  
Standard
February 2010	Progression of OGP Virtual World Primitive Object Format  
to Proposed Standard
June 2010		Progression of OGP Authentication to Proposed Standard
June 2010		Progression of OGP Teleport to Proposed Standard

---

From: "Hurliman, John" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Feb 2009 00:47:29 -0700

As it is written, the charter and timeline effectively subverts investigation of virtual world platform requirements and the evaluation of different technologies that fulfill those requirements. The charter specifically lists technology proposals from Linden Lab as established solutions to virtual world interoperability. The goals and milestones section lists a timeline for standardizing those solutions exclusively. I understand the need to transition Linden Lab proposals to standards, and I support such a move but not at the expense of excluding all other possible solutions. I propose that the charter and timeline be changed to ensure the agenda is open to additional proposals.

John Hurliman

>-----Original Message-----
>From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of
>Meadhbh Hamrick (Infinity)
>Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2009 11:41 AM
>To: [email-masked]
>Subject: [mmox] Work Items and Planning Documents for the MMOX BoF session
>(Draft Charter)
>
>Dear Participants,
>
>proposed. This is a copy of what you'll find on the IETF wiki at
>http://trac.tools.ietf.org/bof/trac/wiki/MmoxCharter
>  .
>

---

From: Morgaine Dinova <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Feb 2009 09:17:35 +0000

On Fri, Feb 6, 2009 at 7:47 AM, Hurliman, John <[email-masked]>wrote:

> As it is written, the charter and timeline effectively subverts
> investigation of virtual world platform requirements and the evaluation of
> different technologies that fulfill those requirements. The charter
> specifically lists technology proposals from Linden Lab as established
> solutions to virtual world interoperability. The goals and milestones
> section lists a timeline for standardizing those solutions exclusively. I
> understand the need to transition Linden Lab proposals to standards, and I
> support such a move but not at the expense of excluding all other possible
> solutions. I propose that the charter and timeline be changed to ensure the
> agenda is open to additional proposals.

John, if the charter, goals and timeline are as you describe, then I agree
with you 100%.  Rubberstamping existing Second Life technology as a standard
for virtual worlds would be totally without merit, and endorsing LL's
current very narrow and unproven OGP solution as THE future Internet
standard under the aegis of the IETF would be ... well, let's not go there.
It would clearly be inappropriate, and unhelpful to the development of
virtual worlds.

However, I do not believe that that is the purpose of this workgroup,
because you will note that the charter is only a draft in expectation of
strong input from MMOX members (and OGP is Work in Progress anyway).  Let's
provide that input immediately, to prevent this starting off on the wrong
foot.

The charter needs to be phrased unambiguously to make it clear that this
workgroup is not an IETF PR annex of Linden Lab, but that it is dedicated
honestly to the creation of a flexible, vendor-agnostic protocol for
interoperation of diverse virtual worlds, not just now but for several years
into the future.  That implies extensibility, in breadth and in depth.  And
it implies openess to alternatives, and a desire to embrace them,

And in particular, it implies a focus on technical merit of solutions, and
not current business interests.

I agree that we appear to have been given a slightly questionable baseline
in LLSD ("Linden Lab Structured Data" is hardly a vendor-agnostic name) and
OGP (Linden Lab's own developing protocol) without any mention of
alternative approaches like Hypergrid that are already in operation.
However, these skews and omissions are (I believe) just artifacts of the
rush to establish MMOX.

Let's see how we can improve this.  I think that it's in our court to set
the path straight.

Morgaine.

---

From: Morgaine Dinova <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Feb 2009 10:31:40 +0000

On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 7:41 PM, Meadhbh Hamrick (Infinity) <
[email-masked]> wrote:

> ...

Let's not get ahead of ourselves here.

Simulators are an artifact of Linden Lab's design choice to expose their
static mapping of regions onto IP-addressable hardware --- an implementation
detail.  What's worse, this little implementation detail has resulted in the
disastrous lack of region scalability that we suffer in Second Life, which
most certainly should not be hardwired into an Internet protocol standard.

This potential RFC document was described earlier in the post as "Guidelines
for using a PKIX compliant X.509 infrastructure to authenticate protocol
endpoints".  That is good enough, as endpoints are necessary.  What is not
necessary is to identify communication endpoints with regions or simulators,
when the regions may be virtual.

Please defer the naming of publication titles until we have had a chance to
iron out the wrinkles.

Morgaine.