RE: Washington IETF Summary

Since Jim mentioned DASL in his summary, I thought it might be nice to
give a reminder to everyone about where you can locate DASL documents of
interest:

- DASL Homepage: http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/dasl
- DASL Charter: http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/dasl/charter.html
- DASL Requirements:
ftp://ftp.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-reddy-dasl-requirements-00.txt
- DASL mailing list archives:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-webdav-dasl/
- DASL mailing list: www-webdav-dasl@w3.org . To join the DASL mailing
list, send email with a body of "subscribe" to
www-webdav-dasl-request@w3.org .

For your convenience I've included the charter below.

-Saveen

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DAV Searching and Locating (DASL)
Description of Working Group

This working group will define the HTTP extensions necessary to enable
the location of HTTP resources based upon the value of the properties
and text content of those resources. These extensions will provide
searching interoperability among the variety of underlying storage
systems whose data can be exposed by WEBDAV.

The WEBDAV protocol defines a simple set of mechanisms to manipulate and
retrieve properties on resources. Interaction is at the individual
resource. WEBDAV provides no mechanism to locate efficiently the set of
resource matching a user-desired criteria on their properties. The
mechanisms defined in WEBDAV allow only the most primitive support to
this operation, one that requires extensive manual processing and
network usage by the client and does not take advantage of the advanced
querying and caching capabilities of many storage systems.

The functional needs for DAV search encompass the following
capabilities, which shall be considered by this working group: 

IN-SCOPE:

	*Criteria: relative comparisons on string and non-string values:
>, <, etc.
	*How to deal with internationalized content.
	*Use of existing querying mechanisms schemes.
	*Definition of a simple query syntax for interoperability
	*Extensibility mechanisms to allow advanced queries
	*Standard result format 
	*Multi-server search
	*Simple text content search
	*Implementation of functionality by non-origin proxies 

A generalized Search mechanism is a broad problem space. It can be
considered to encompass a wide variety of object models, typing schemes,
and media. However, by focusing on the better-defined problem space of
locating resources based on property values and text content, the
working group will leverage much of the existing work that has been done
on querying under the simple property models.

To more clearly focus the working group, the following list of "out of
scope" elements have been developed. This working group to avoid the
inclusion any item, unless it is impossible or impractical to create a
useful set of searching mechanism without it: 

NOT IN SCOPE: 
	*Definition of default property sets for resources 
	*Server to server communication protocols 
	*Searches for non-property values or values not in text content
	*Content-based criteria for non-text content (i.e images,
sounds, etc.)
	*Data definition language: resource/table creation,
property/column manipulation, etc.

Deliverables 
The final output of this working group is expected to be two documents: 
	A requirements document, which describes the high-level
functional requirements for DASL, including rationale. 
	Additions to WEBDAV which describes new methods, headers,
request bodies, and response bodies, to implement the DASL requirements.


Goals and Milestones:
	(Specification) Produce DASL specification. Submit as Internet
Draft.	
	(Meeting, Specification, Requirements) Meet at meet in LA (March
'98) and hold working group meeting to develop the protocol
specification and requirements document.	
	(Requirements) Create final version of DASL requirements
document. Submit as Informational RFC.	
	(Specification) Produce revised DASL specification. Submit as
Internet Draft.	
	(Specification) Complete revisions to DASL. Submit as a Proposed
Standard RFC

Received on Wednesday, 17 December 1997 13:54:28 UTC