Charting Networks in the Directory

[Glenn Mansfield <[e-mail]>]

Hi Folks,

Since the July IETF, we have had several, comments, suggestions and
discussions on our proposal related to representing communication
networks in the directory.
Based on the feedback, results of experimentation and developments
in the area we have worked on the original proposal and arrived at 
a polished/revised version. 

The work presently comprises 4 documents

	[1] Charting Networks in the Directory
	[2] Representing IP Information in the Directory
	[3] Representing File Information in the Directory
	[4] The SoftPages Project 

A brief description of the contents follow:

[1] Presents a general framework for representing communication networks
in the directory. An attempt has been made to provide a general framework
which can serve the requirements of multiple functional ( OSI, IP, XNS
... ) and organizational (user, provider, .... ) views of the (physical)
network and its components. 

[2] Applies the framework of (1) to the Internet. It provides a mapping
from IP-adddresses to the various view of the corresponding IP-network.
The delegated-block concept is introduced to accomodate the new CIDR
related proposals, and to introduce some granularity into almost flat
IP-address space.

[3] This document describes a scheme to represent the contents of file 
servers in the Directory. The purpose of this scheme to provide
a globally distributed DB of the contents of anonymous (ftp) servers.

[4] Documents an application of the above scheme to provide optimized
document retrieval. The SoftPages uses the framework of (2) and (3)
to locate a document/software at the "nearest"/"cheapest" possible
server. 

The above framework is fairly rich as far as possibilities of applications
are concerned. [The ConMan Project is afoot at AIC, Tohoku University
and the WIDE Internet Japan, to provide Configuration Management services 
( route,traffic, policy, .. management)  using the above framework ] 

The documents will be available by anonymous ftp from ftp.tohoku.ac.jp in
the ~ftp/pub/spp directory under the following headings:

	[1]Charting Networks in the Directory:		  nd-draft.ps
	[2]Representing IP Information in the Directory:  ip-draft.ps
	[3]Representing File Information in the Directory:fn-draft.ps
	[4]The SoftPages Project :			  spp-draft.ps

9/11/92 10:00 JST onwards.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
We are hoping that the above proposals will be discussed at the IETF-OSI-DS
meeting. But unfortunately neither Thomas nor myself will be making it 
to Washington this time; Thomas will be on business in Berlin and I am 
tied down with some other unavoidable stuff in Sendai :-(

cheers

glenn



 *****************************************************************
 * Glenn Mansfield                                               *
 * AIC Systems Laboratory                Phone : [phone] *
 * 6-6-3, Minami Yoshinari               Fax   : [phone] *
 * Sendai, Japan. 989-32                 e-mail: [e-mail] *
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