Proposed LIDS Working Group

[Ken Weiss <[e-mail]>]

I strongly agree with Paul-Andre's comment that the "white pages" service
should be extensible enough to serve as an index to documents as well as
people. The aspect of Whois++ that interests me the most is the way the
specification has evolved from a very limited white pages service to a
generalized tool for publishing and managing distributed databases. Now, if
the code can just catch up to the specification... :-)

To accomplish this flexibility I think the protocol will need to provide a
very rich set of negotiation options between the client and the server. For
that reason I'm a little concerned by Erik's suggestion that the
architecture, schema and search/maintenance engine efforts be separated. I
think it will be difficult for the developers of the search/maintenance
engine to proceed without full participation in the development of the
architecture that defines the possible interactions between client and
server. On the other hand, I agree that one really big workgroup probably
won't get anything done at all. I guess this isn't so much a comment as a
warning flag. The coordination and organization of these efforts will be a
major issue, and probably ought to be addressed explicitly in the charter.

--Ken




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Ken Weiss                                          [e-mail]
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