[alto] PID Properties in ALTO

[Richard Alimi <[e-mail]>]

Hi All,

Okay, third and final thread for discussion today :)  Another proposed
extension to the ALTO protocol has been to associate properties (like
we currently have with Endpoints) with PIDs.

A proposed use case in draft-penno-alto-cdn was to indicate what types
of endpoints lived within a single PID. A more general mechanism to
support this would be to allow properties to be associated with a PID
as whole. In one light, this could be seen as an efficient way to
query for the properties of all endpoints within a PID (in which
membership in the PID determines the value of the property). It could
also be used to attach some semantic meaning to a PID (instead of
being an opaque identifier) in particular deployments.

One way to support this would be to provide an additional "PID
Property" service, with a similar structure to the Endpoint Property
Service. Basically, it would amount to defining a registry, allowing
an ALTO Server to indicate its supported properties via capabilities,
defining encodings for the request and response, etc.

Thoughts about supporting this?

Thanks,
Rich