User Services Area

Director:


   o Joyce K. Reynolds:  jkrey@isi.edu


Area Summary reported by Joyce Reyolds/Information Sciences Institute

Nine active working groups and two BOFs (ARTS and RWHOIS) were held in
the User Services Area (USV) of the IETF in San Jose, California.  Two
new working groups met for the first time:  Site Security Handbook (SSH)
and Responsible Use of the Network (RUN).


The Arts:  Sharing Center Stage on the Internet BOF (ARTS)

Scott Stoner and Susan Siegfried welcomed participants (about 60
persons), outlined the agenda, and asked each person to introduce
themselves and their interest in the arts on the Internet.

Susan Siegfried summarized two recent national reports (distributed to
BOF participants) that address issues identified at the previous BOF
session:  ``Arts, Humanities, and Culture on the NII,'' report of the
Information Infrastructure Task Force Committee on Applications and
Technology, NIST, U.S. Department of Commerce and ``Humanities and Arts
on the Information Highways,'' report developed by The Getty Art History
Information Program, The American Council of Learned Societies, and The
Coalition for Networked Information (the reports were also made
available to IETF participants at the distribution table by the IETF
registration desk).

The remainder of the session was devoted to reviewing and clarifying the
mission and goals for a proposed IETF Arts and Humanities Working Group,
after which participants agreed that such a proposal should indeed be
presented to the IESG. Further details of the discussion will be
included in the BOF minutes, however, there was consensus that the
mission of the working group would be to draw upon the expertise of IETF
members to define and promote an arts and humanities-based
infrastructure that would enable users to 1) contribute as well as
locate information, and 2) create and/or present visual and performing
arts work over the Internet.  The means to do this will also be defined
as goals in the proposal.

Co-coordinators Stoner and Siegfried will develop a draft proposal for
review and approval by Joyce Reynolds, the USV Area Director (to be
completed by the end of February).  Reynolds will present the proposal
for review and approval by the IESG prior to the next IETF meeting in
April 1995.


Referral Whois BOF (RWHOIS)

A brief overview of RWhois was presented to the group, followed by a
discussion of secondary and on-line editing mechanisms.  Further
discussion ensued on server functionality regarding boolean and partial
match support.  It was agreed to drop this requirement from the RWhois
specification and make it optional.  At the conclusion of the meeting, a
consensus was reached to generate a charter and request to become a
working group under the Operations Area of the IETF to document and plan
the roll out of RWhois in the delegated Internet registry environment.


Integrated Directory Services Working Group (IDS)

The Internet X.500 Schema Task Force will operate as per the ``to be
published'' RFC and is ready to accept schema updates.

The X.500 Production Directory Service Internet-Draft will be progressed
to an Informational RFC and a Last Call will be sent to the mailing
list.

There was a lively discussion on the Informational Privacy Model with a
number of actions to be continued on the mailing list.

Liaison reports were received from DANTE, PSI, NADF, The Long Bud
Project, WHOIS++, and AARNET.

Technical presentations were given on the Harvest and Nomenclator
projects and the working group resolved to discuss possible applications
of these technologies for the white-pages problem.

Chris Apple, Todd Bernard, and Ken Rossen have volunteered to take on
the project for producing and maintaining the X.500 Implementations
Catalog in HTML. Chris Weider volunteered to create the WHOIS++
Implementations Catalog in HTML. These catalogs will be held by InterNIC
Directory and Database Services.


Integration of Internet Information Resources Working Group (IIIR)

There were approximately one hundred participants, half of which
indicated they were newcomers.  Following a brief introduction to IIIR,
Chris Weider discussed the current status of current IIIR documents.
``Z39.50 Over TCP/IP'' by Cliff Lynch, ``A Vision of an Integrated
Internet'' by Chris Weider and Peter Deutsch as well as ``Resource
Transponders'' by Chris Weider have all been approved and sent to the
RFC Editor as Informational RFCs.  They are predicted to be published by
the end of the calendar year by the RFC Editor.  An informal report on
the IAB workshop was presented in three sections:  ``Caching and
Replication'' by Tim Berners-Lee and Mike Schwartz, ``Security and
Authentication'' by Karen Sollins and ``Searching'' by Chris Weider.
Cliff Lynch discussed a paper on NIDR that he, Cecilia Preston, Craig
Summerhill and Avra Michelson are working on as part of a CNI
initiative.  Gorden Irwal gave a presentation on his vision of an
Internet information architecture.  The remaining time was spent
discussing the future of the IIIR working group.  Consensus was reached
that the working group should continue but with perhaps a more general
scope than traditional working groups.  Hence, the charter is being
rewritten by the chairs to reflect this consensus.


Internet School Networking Working Group (ISN)

The first part of the meeting was spent reviewing the charter, goals,
and milestones for those that were new to the ISN group.  An invitation
had been extended to K-12 educators to attend this ISN Working Group,
and there were quite a few in attendance.  Jennifer noted that the goals
and milestones will need to be updated before the next IETF in Danvers,
MA. She also noted that FYI22 , FYI on Questions and Answers:  Answers
to Commonly Asked ``Primary and Secondary School Internet User''
Questions, will need updating.  Jennifer announced that she will be
stepping down as ISN chair after this meeting.  Jodi Chu will be taking
over in March 95.

Current status of the group's goals and milestones are as follows:

March 94 goals have been met by the release of
draft-ietf-isn-expectations-00.txt, ``Ways to Define User Expectations''
and the publication of RFC 1709 ``K-12 Internetworking Guidelines.''

July 94 goals (K-12 White Pages project) have been met by defining
information fields needed in the database.  InterNIC Directory Services
offered to host the data in an X.500 directory.  CNIDR offered to host
the data in WHOIS++.

There was much discussion as to whether or not the database should be an
X.500 directory.  It was decided that a committee would work with the
InterNIC Directory Services group to determine the feasibility of such
an implementation.  Ed Klein from SURANet will create a Web form for
data submission.  Susan Calcari reported that CNIDR is currently working
on the WHOIS++ proof-of-concept project.

March 95 goals (Document Repository Project) are to write a set of two
documents:  guidelines for connection providers and guidelines for
educational sites.  A review of existing documents show that there are
adequate guidelines already written.  Therefore, the goal needs to be
modified to create a repository of documents or pointers to existing
documents instead of writing new documents.  Brian Lloyd offered to
house the documents.  Sepi Boroumand offered to maintain the currency of
the repository.

The remaining time was spent by having the attendees give brief
descriptions about their interests/projects regarding the K-12
community.  A list of FTP, Web and Gopher URLs for information on the
various projects will be sent to the mailing list.


Network Information Services Infrastructure Working Group (NISI)

The InterNIC updated the group on the NIC Locator service and the new
InterNIC Briefcase.  The group discussed the current Internet-Draft
``Network Information Center Guidelines,'' deciding which sections
should be cut.  It was decided that once the current Internet-Draft was
submitted to the RFC Editor, that the group would probably close down,
but not before the members on the mailing list and the Area Director got
their two cents in regarding such a decision.


Responsible Use of the Network Working Group (RUN)

The RUN working group met for the first time in San Jose.  They agreed
on an outline for the Netiquette Guide the group will produce.  They
agreed to drop the requirement that the bibliography become an
Internet-Draft.  They then took a bibliography posted to the list and
split it among attendees who will report what each source says as each
section is discussed on the list.  There will be an Internet-Draft of
the guide by the Danvers meeting.


Site Security Handbook Working Group (SSH)

The group decided to create the Site Security Handbook for System and
Network Administrators first and when that's well on its way, to begin
the creation of a Site Security Handbook for Users.

During this working group session, the group assigned people to review
chapters of the current RFC 1244.  A list was then created of topics to
be included in the new document and writing assignments given for those
topic areas.  The group plans to have an Internet-Draft available by the
next IETF meeting in Danvers.


Network Training Materials Working Group (TRAINMAT)

The TRAINMAT Working Group discussed the draft catalogue of network
training materials.  This contains nearly 100 entries entered by a
world-wide set of volunteers using the TRAINMAT template which was based
on the IAFA recommendations.  The templates had either been completed
and submitted via e-mail or added using the forms interface on Mark
Prior's HTML version of the catalogue at the University of Adelaide.
The problems of using the IAFA style template were discussed as were the
individual attributes and the range of their values.  A set of broad
categories for the entries was drawn up.  The next stage is to reduce
the catalogue down by about half and to ensure the materials remaining
are judged to be ``quality'' materials by the working group.  A start
was made on this at the meeting.

Mark Handley from UCL gave a presentation on using network
video-conferencing for training.  He gave some existing examples of
teaching of surgery over an ATM video-conferencing network in the UK,
and of pilot demos to surgeons using the MBONE. In his opinion, the
MBONE is still too fragile for ``prime time'' training.  He also
described CUSeeMe and the current efforts to integrate this with MBONE.
Trainers need to start doing small scale experiments to become
comfortable with the technology.

Jill Foster reported on the progress with registering Powerpoint as an
IETF-type, and closed the meeting with the usual round table update on
network training activities.


Uniform Resource Identifiers Working Group (URI)

The URI group made good progress since the last meeting in work on the
mailing list and outside IETF meetings in splitting the URC document
into a ``requirements and scenarios'' document and a ``proposed
specification.''  Discussion was vigorous and very useful; the URC
documents are expected to undergo major rewrite soon because of it.
Similarly, various URN proposals were discussed and differences aired;
the proposals are still being tested by their respective proponents.

On the URL front, progress was made on the relative URL specification,
and discussed a proposed Z39.50 URL.


User Services Working Group (USWG)

Joyce Reynolds presented reports on IETF User Services Area activities
and progress of USWG projects since the Toronto IETF. This included the
closure of the User Documents Revisions Working Group (USERDOC2).
Current FYI RFC publications included:  FYI 26, ``K-12 Internetworking
Guidelines,'' and FYI 25, ``A Status Report on Networked Information
Retrieval:  Tools and Groups.''

Joyce also reported on the RARE and EARN merger, now called TERENA
(Trans-European Research and Education Network Association), and a brief
update on EARN's Network Services Conference in London, 28-30 November.
Jill Foster presented an update on the TERENA ISUS Working Group and its
current task forces and proposals.

Susan Calcari presented an update and discussion on the USV-WEB that she
and the InterNIC are assisting the USWG with.  Lenore Jackson assisted
the USWG Chair with a report and discussion on unfinished business with
USERDOC2 documentation.