I-D Action:draft-kunze-oxum-00.txt

A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories.

	Title           : Oxum: Octet Stream Sum http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-kunze-oxum-00.txt
	Author(s)       : J. Kunze
	Filename        : draft-kunze-oxum-00.txt
	Pages           : 10
	Date            : 2008-11-18

This document specifies "oxum", a two-part number, OCTETS.STREAMS,
that is a kind of simple size summary for complex digital objects.
In the mainstream case of a complex object that is a set of files,
the STREAMS part is the total number of files and the OCTETS part is
the total number of 8-bit bytes across all those files; for example,
an oxum of 876543.21 could mean a total of 876,543 bytes across 21
files.  Which set of streams comprises a complex object for an oxum
computation depends in general on the object's type.  One important
type is the stream set defined by the set of files contained in a
file hierarchy.  An oxum is not a checksum in that, while a changed
oxum means a changed object, an unchanged oxum does not mean an
unchanged object.1.  The size of a digital object

It can be hard to characterize the size of an arbitrary digital
object.  Word count, page count, image dimensions, video running
time, or number of database records might all be useful metrics,
depending on the type of the object.  For a single file, one crude
but easily obtained metric is the number of octets (8-bit bytes) in
the file.  This document introduces an analogous metric for a
_complex digital object_, by which we mean an object that is not
equivalent to a single file.  A complex object may consist of a group
of files or parts of one or more files (e.g., a database).2.  The octet
stream sum (oxum)

A complex digital object that has a well-defined set of octet
streams, such as a document represented by a group of 14 text and
image files, has a well-defined "oxum" (octet stream sum).  The oxum
is a two part number such as

  567898.14

which corresponds to 567,898 octets spread over 14 files.  The
general form of an oxum is

  OCTETS.STREAMS

where STREAMS is the total number of streams (e.g., files) and OCTETS
is the total number of octets across all those streams.  In general,
these two numbers will be positive integers, although there may be
situations (not described here) in which it makes sense for either
one of them to be left unspecified with a hyphen ('-').  The period
('.') separator is required.  Other examples:

1998.10

  # 1998 octets spread over 10 streams
105.3

 # 105 octets, 3 streams (not 105 and 3 tenths)
21436794142.831

# almost 19 Gigabytes spread over 831 streams
709895249489.8756
 # about 661 Gb, or 710 Gb if you divide by 1000
-.1

# one stream, but number of octets not known yet

The oxum is designed to be machine readable and to fit into a variety
of syntactic contexts, such as command lines, file paths, URL
[RFC3986] query strings, and XML [XML] tags.

Note that the oxum is _not_ designed as a secure digest or checksum.
While an oxum cannot change without a change to the object, an
unchanged oxum absolutely does not imply an unchanged object.  Do not
use oxum in place of a cryptographic digest algorithm (cf. SHA1
[RFC3174]).3.  Oxum complex object types

An _oxum object type_ is used to describe how to derive an object's
stream set.  For oxum to be meaningful for an object type, the type
must have a well-defined, canonical stream set.  Once the stream set
is known, the oxum computation is straightforward and the streams can
be processed in any order.  One especially natural way to derive a
stream set is to define a way to reduce an object type to a file
group.

Files are primal streams.  In this document, a "regular" file is a
contiguous sequence of octets with a well-defined start and end,
whether the sequence is named in static storage (e.g., "memo.pdf") or
is unnamed and recently retrieved (e.g., a web page) from a network
socket.  There are many filesystem entities that are not regular
files, including directory nodes, block special files, and symbolic
links.  In this document, the word "file" usually refers to a regular
file.

A (regular) file is an oxum-ready stream.  As a base case, a complex
object consisting of exactly one file has an oxum of the form
"OCTETS.1", as in

  12345.1

Things get more interesting when dealing with more than one file.
Any private or public agreement can be made about what constitutes a
file group, hence a stream set, for the purposes of an oxum
computation.  A stream set might be declared to comprise all the
attachments of an email message, or all the files resulting from a
normalized dump procedure run against the tables of a database.  An
easily delineated group is all the files contained in a directory.

Any recognized group of regular files can form on oxum stream set,
including a simple manifest or list of filenames.  For example, a
transfer protocol might use oxum to help set the receiver's
expectations in terms of total bytes and files contained in a
transferred package [GRABIT].

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