Re: Directory Services Work coordination proposal

["Barry M. Leiner" <[e-mail]>]

Erik,

I think the document captures the discussion I heard and should move
things forward.

One question, though. Most of this discussion is (appropriately) about
the technical issues of WPS. Given the difficulty over the past
several years of establishing a ubiquitous WPS, despite the best
efforts of a large number of people, and despite the availability of
reasonable if not perfect technology, I wonder about deployment and
operational issues.

For example, consider the problem of maintaining accurate information.
I can imagine several possible modes.

1. user centered - A user maintains the information on him/herself
with some friendly little client program, and then interacts with all
the databases that should know about him/her. For example, I would
like to be "findable" via USRA, IETF, IEEE, ACM, Mt. View, Sunnyvale,
etc. Do I need to establish a primary database (primary server) for
me? etc.

2. organization based - user doesn't want to do anything to maintain
the information, and relies on his/her organization (company, local
geographic server, etc.) to maintain the information.

3. central server based - something like the old whois service but
broken down into some fairly large categories.

Now for each of them, the problems of limited access to the
information, maintenance, distribution/replication, etc. needs to be
addressed. 

So bottom line - has the "operational scenario(s)" been established
for WPS, against which the technical work is being done?

regards,

Barry