The announcements of the four Working Groups were sent to the IETF mailing list. For instructions to retreive the charters from anonymous FTP sites or by mail, please send a message to ietf-info@nri.reston.va.us. Greg Vaudreuil ------- Forwarded Message Date: Thu, 24 Sep 92 17:55:13 -0400 From: Greg Vaudreuil <gvaudre@NRI.Reston.VA.US> To: IETF-Announce: ; Subject: IESG Information Architecture In Following messages, the IESG will announce several new Working Groups in the User Services and Applications Areas chartered to integrate Internet Information services. Below is a draft statement of the architectural framework written by the Working Group chairs and the Area Directors as part of the chartering process. For more information, please contact Joyce Reynolds or Russ Hobby. Greg Vaudreuil IESG Secretary. "Integrated Information Architecture" (Revised 9/15/92) Many new networked services to identify, access, and retrieve information resources have sprung up in the last several years -- archie, WAIS, and Netfind, to name only three. Now, much as the Internet has tied many disparate networks together into an integrated system, the pressing problem is how to integrate these many new services into a single coordinated Internet information naming, discovery, and retrieval system. There are three vital areas of this integration effort that the IESG is interested in pursuing: 1) The identification, cataloging, and documentation of networked information services, new and old. 2) The standardization of descriptions and identification schemes for networked resources, and the distribution and implementation of these identifiers. 3) The integration and interoperability of the various new information services. To this end, the IESG is creating three new working groups: 1) Networked Information Retrieval (NIR) -- NIR will work on the first issue above by identifying, cataloging, and documenting networked information services. The result will be a published catalog of network information retrieval services. In addition, NIR will liaise with other organizations working on this goal, such as RARE ISUS and CNI. 2) Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) -- URI will concentrate on the second issue above, particularly on the standardization and implementation of identification schemes for networked resources. There will be two primary components in this effort: a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) which is a string which tells how to locate a document. The second part is a Universal Resource Serial Number, which is used to uniquely identify a resource, so that one can, for example tell if two documents with different file names are, in fact, the same. The standard identification scheme developed by URI will be used by NIR to define the standard resource formats. 3) Integration of Internet Information Resources (IIIR) -- IIIR will work on the third issue by developing technical specifications and documentation for a) interoperation between the various information services and b) the integration of new information services into the existing CIM (combined information mesh). After the specifications for interoperation have been completed, IIIR will examine the need for additional protocols necessary to further integrate the CIM, including gateway protocols, query routing protocols, and other mechanisms. In addition to the above named groups, the IETF wishes to facilitate the standardization of descriptions and data formats for various specific information services by chartering single-protocol working groups which will work on this standardization. Examples of such groups are the Internet Anonymous FTP Archive group (IAFA), which is working on standardization of anonymous FTP archives, and the new Whois Network Information Lookup Service (WNILS), which is working on standardization of services using the WHOIS protocol. The IESG considers these WGs to be components of a single coordinated IETF effort to create an integrated Internet information architecture. Therefore, the chairs and membership of each group will be active participants in the other groups. The overall coordination of this effort will be under the joint management of the Applications and User Services Area. Due to the importance of an Integrated Internet Information Service Architecture, the IESG requests the working group chairs and the Applications and User Services area directors to jointly expand this brief overview into a more fully fleshed out architectural statement, and to issue periodic progress reports describing how the integrated information service is developing. ------- End of Forwarded Message