[ESDS] Proposed Charter

[Ali Rezafard <[e-mail]>]

Dear ESDS group,

Below is the proposed charter and work items for our work group. Please 
review and comment.

Extensible Supply-chain Discovery Service (ESDS)
=====================================

Chair(s):
    Mark Harrison <mark.harrison at cantab.net>
Applications Area Director(s):
    Lisa Dusseault <lisa at osafoundation.org>
    Chris Newman <chris.newman at sun.com>
Applications Area Advisor:
    Lisa Dusseault <lisa at osafoundation.org>
Mailing List(s):
    esds at ietf.org
General information about the mailing list is at:
    https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/esds

Purpose of Working Group:
-----------------------------------
The use of Supply chain Tracking Systems is rising at an unprecedented 
rate, particularly as various industry sectors are increasingly adopting 
automatic identification technologies such as Radio-Frequency 
Identification (RFID) to automatically track individual physical objects 
as they move through a supply chain.  Rather than tracking at batch or 
lot level, the ultimate goal of this technology is that each individual 
physical object will have its own unique ID, which can be used to gather 
and retrieve complete lifecycle information about the object, which is 
fragmented across the supply chain. Deployment of these systems has 
grown to a point where they can no longer operate effectively in 
isolation from other systems.  There is a need to share data among these 
disparate systems, which are owned and operated by separate organizations.

ESDS has been chartered to architect and define the protocol of a 
Discovery Service for global supply chains. ESDS's goal is to enable 
searching for information on physical objects flowing in a supply chain, 
by authorized and authenticated users.  Economic and technical factors 
dictate that Discovery Services and their protocol ESDS must be designed 
for deployment on the Internet. Access control, data protection and 
security are of utmost importance, due to sensitivity and value of the 
information generated by the supply chain.

Goals and Milestones:
----------------------------
The work group will address to the following work items:

1) Define common vocabulary and terminology
2) Define core data sets for sharing on Discovery Service, including 
required data fields, optional data fields, and extensible data fields 
(e.g. who, what, when, where, why, links, identifier, lifecycle, class, 
etc.)
3) Define fault tolerance for missing required data fields
4) Define mechanism for uniquely identifying objects in a supply chain 
without requiring a global unique identifier for each and all objects 
that enter a supply chain
5) Define handling for time zones (e.g. accepting only UTC timestamps 
vs. accepting timestamps with any timezone)
6) Define a protocol for advertising/publishing data resources (Resource 
Discovery)
7) Define a protocol and policy for retracting or voiding published data
8) Define a protocol for querying published data, facilitating both 
one-time queries and standing queries (e.g. pull vs. push queries)
9) Define a common interface for access control configuration (e.g. 
supply chain, partner, user, roles)
10) Define security architecture and mechanisms for authorization, 
authentication , encryption (e.g.
integrating security certificates into the protocol vs. relying on a 
security layer such as SSL)
11) Architect a bootstrapping policy for objects while ensuring security 
and confidentiality
12) Define a common configuration interface for each category of 
policies (e.g. access policies, retention policies, archiving policies, 
purging  policies, audit policies, QoS policies, propagation policies)
13) Define policies for updating stale and broken links (e.g. for 
records with a long retention period, it is vital that links can be 
updated, when required)
14) Validate that the deployment architecture is independent, scalable 
and robust
15) Determine how aggregation and disaggregation events should be 
handled including policies for access control and visibility of these 
events (e.g. a pallet is broken down into boxes and each box has its own 
destination supply chain)
16) Determine if multilayer information visibility is required (e.g. a 
query with limited access can be informed of the existence of 
information for a particular object, but to view the actual information, 
full access privileges would be required. This has particular 
implications for peer-to-peer searching across multiple Discovery Services)
17) Define a peer-to-peer protocol to enable linking Discovery Service 
servers together



_______________________________________________
ESDS mailing list
[e-mail]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/esds