Completed questionnaire and position paper

Hello members of the DDWG team, 

Here is a completed version of DDWG questionnaire for DELI.

I have also produced a short position paper that outlines my thoughts on
the issues faced by current device description technologies. I think it
should be helpful to your work and I enclose a copy as HTML. If you need
it in another format, or there are any problems with readability please
let me know. I am happy to answer questions or discuss the questionnaire
or the position paper. 

best regards

Mark H. Butler, PhD
mark-h.butler@hp.com
HP Labs Bristol http://www.hpl.hp.com/people/marbut

=====================
Questionnaire starts

1- Your Name
  
Mark H. Butler
---------------------------------

2- Affiliation
  
Hewlett Packard Laboratories Bristol
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3- Name of device description technology or device description product
----

DELI - Delivery Context Library for CC/PP and UAProf

http://delicon.sourceforge.net/
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4- Status of technology 
----
For example, indicate whether the technology is an open standard, a
reference implementation or a proprietary technology.

DELI is an open source prototype implementation of 

i)	a Java API for servers to read CC/PP and UAProf information.
ii)	a command line validator for validating UAProf profiles. 

Although DELI is a prototype, it is widely used, for two reasons: i) it
is open source, so people have been able to take it and customize it for
their purposes ii) it has better support for validation than other
validators because it reads the vocabulary description directly from the
RDF Schema rather than requiring this information to be hardcoded within
the validator or stored in a proprietary XML format. 

---------------------------------

5- Context of the technology 
----
Is the technology or product used for content adaptation? If not, what
is
its purpose? What is the target audience? Is it a standalone technology,
or is it part of another product or platform?

DELI is a component to be used in a content adaptation solution. It is
possible to use DELI with Apache Cocoon to create a content adaptation
architecture. Various products on the market have taken DELI and used it
to process UAProf information. 

There are two target audiences:

i)	UAProf and CC/PP developers who want to use device information,
but who do not want to spend time learning about more general RDF tools 
ii)	mobile vendors who want to check the UAProf profiles they are
publishing are correct and processable by other tools

---------------------------------

6- What markup languages does your product support? 
----

Question not applicable as this is not a standalone product. 

---------------------------------

7- What are input and output features supported by your product ?
----

Question not applicable - these features are determined by the
particular RDFS device vocabulary being used. 

 ---------------------------------

8- Description 
----
If you can, please provide a brief architectural overview of the
technology or product.

See http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/marbut/DeliUserGuideWEB.htm and
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/marbut/

---------------------------------

9- Reliance or usage of existing standards 
----
Please indicate how the device-description part of your technology or
product builds (or relies upon) existing standards. For example: HTTP,
XML, CC/PP, etc

DELI processes CC/PP and UAProf device information, exchanged using
HTTP. As CC/PP and UAProf both use RDF, it processes RDF and RDF Schema
descriptions of vocabularies.

For more details see the URLs in answer (8). 
---------------------------------

10- Does the technology specify, or provide, a repository (or
repositories)
for the storage of the device descriptions?
----

No. 

---------------------------------

11- Vocabulary
----
Does the technology specify an explicit vocabulary of device attributes?

No, as long as the vocabulary is described using RDF Schema. 

---------------------------------

12- Does the technology specify, or provide, a process or mechanism  for
the
capture of attributes for a specific device?
----

No. 

---------------------------------

13- Does the technology specify, or provide, a technique for querying a
repository to extract device descriptions?
----

Yes. DELI provides a Java API for querying the profile information - see
the
URLs in answer (8) for more information. 

---------------------------------

14 Do you believe that the essential device information should be
publicly
available?
----

Yes
 
END of the Questionnaire