Subject: Re: [media-types] [ietf-types] Mime Type registration (PROV Last Call)

From: Luc Moreau <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2012 16:24:20 +0000

Dear all

Thanks for your feedback.  We have updated the registration request
for media type "text/provenance-notation" as follows.

Your comments would be appreciated,
Kind regards,
Luc

-----------------------

The media type of PROV-N is text/provenance-notation. The content 
encoding of PROV-N content is UTF-8.

Contact:
Ivan Herman

See also:
How to Register a Media Type for a W3C Specification
Internet Media Type registration, consistency of use
TAG Finding 3 June 2002 (Revised 4 September 2002)
The Internet Media Type / MIME Type for PROV-N is 
"text/provenance-notation".

It is recommended that PROV-N files have the extension ".provn" (all 
lowercase) on all platforms.

It is recommended that PROV-N files stored on Macintosh HFS file systems 
be given a file type of "TEXT".

The information that follows has been submitted to the IESG for review, 
approval, and registration with IANA.

Type name:
text

Subtype name:
provenance-notation

Required parameters:
charset — the value of charset must always be UTF-8.

Optional parameters:
None

Encoding considerations: 8bit
The syntax of PROV-N is expressed over code points in Unicode [UNICODE]. 
The encoding is always UTF-8 [UTF-8].

Unicode code points may also be expressed using an \uXXXX (U+0 to 
U+FFFF) or \UXXXXXXXX syntax (for U+10000 onwards) where X is a 
hexadecimal digit [0-9A-F]

Security considerations:
PROV-N is a general-purpose language for describing the provenance of 
things; applications may evaluate given data to infer more descriptions 
or to dereference URIs, invoking the security considerations of the 
scheme for that URI. Note in particular, the privacy issues in [RFC3023] 
section 10 for HTTP URIs. Data obtained from an inaccurate or malicious 
data source may lead to inaccurate or misleading conclusions, as well as 
the dereferencing of unintended URIs. Care must be taken to align the 
trust in consulted resources with the sensitivity of the intended use of 
the data.

PROV-N is used to express the provenance of arbitrary application data; 
security considerations will vary by domain of use. Security tools and 
protocols applicable to text (e.g. PGP encryption, MD5 sum validation, 
password-protected compression) may also be used on PROV-N documents. 
Security/privacy protocols must be imposed which reflect the sensitivity 
of the embedded information.

PROV-N can express data which is presented to the user, for example, by 
means of label attributes. Application rendering strings retrieved from 
untrusted PROV-N documents must ensure that malignant strings may not be 
used to mislead the reader. The security considerations in the media 
type registration for XML ([RFC3023] section 10) provide additional 
guidance around the expression of arbitrary data and markup.

PROV-N is a language for describing the provenance of things, and 
therefore a PROV-N document is metadata for other resources. Untrusted 
PROV-N documents may mislead its consumers by indicating that a 
third-party resource has a reputable lineage, when it has not. 
Provenance of PROV-N document should be sought.

PROV-N uses qualified names mappeable to IRIs as term identifiers. 
Applications interpreting data expressed in PROV-N should address the 
security issues of Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs) 
[RFC3987] Section 8, as well as Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): 
Generic Syntax [RFC3986] Section 7.

Multiple IRIs may have the same appearance. Characters in different 
scripts may look similar (a Cyrillic "о" may appear similar to a Latin 
"o"). A character followed by combining characters may have the same 
visual representation as another character (LATIN SMALL LETTER E 
followed by COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT has the same visual representation as 
LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE). Any person or application that is 
writing or interpreting data in PROV-N must take care to use the IRI 
that matches the intended semantics, and avoid IRIs that make look 
similar. Further information about matching of similar characters can be 
found in Unicode Security Considerations [UNISEC] and Internationalized 
Resource Identifiers (IRIs) [RFC3987] Section 8.

Interoperability considerations:
There are no known interoperability issues.

Published specification:
PROV-N: The Provenance Notation, Moreau, Missier, eds., Cheney, 
Soiland-Reyes http://www.w3.org/TR/prov-n/, 2012.

Applications which use this media type:
It may be used by any application for publishing provenance information. 
This format is designed to be a human-readable form of provenance.

Additional information:

Magic number(s):
PROV-N documents may have the strings 'document' near the beginning of 
the document.

File extension(s):
".provn"

Base URI:
There are no constructs in the PROV-N Syntax to change the Base IRI.

Macintosh file type code(s):
"TEXT"

Person & email address to contact for further information:
Ivan Herman, [email-masked]

Intended usage:
COMMON

Restrictions on usage:
None

Author/Change controller:
The PROV-N specification is the product of the World Wide Web 
Consortium's PROV Working Group. The W3C has change control over this 
specification.

On 07/27/2012 01:41 PM, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
> * Luc Moreau wrote:
>> Type name:
>> text
>>
>> Subtype name:
>> provenance-notation
>>
>> Required parameters:
>> None
>>
>> Optional parameters:
>> charset — this parameter is mandatory. The value of charset is always UTF-8.
> This seems to need work, it's not optional if it is mandatory, is it.
> And The second sentence is a statement of fact that is easily contr-
> dicted by content.
>
>> Encoding considerations:
>> The syntax of PROV-N is expressed over code points in Unicode
>> [UNICODE5]. The encoding is always UTF-8 [UTF-8].
>> Unicode code points may also be expressed using an \uXXXX (U+0 to
>> U+FFFF) or \UXXXXXXXX syntax (for U+10000 onwards) where X is a
>> hexadecimal digit [0-9A-F]
> This field should contain one of the values in RFC 4288 or its successor
> if that has been approved already, like "binary".
>
>> Applications which use this media type:
>> No widely deployed applications are known to use this media type. It may
>> be used by some web services and clients consuming their data.
> You can remove the first sentence, this is to give people an idea
> whether this is for Word processing applications or cryptographic
> key exchange systems or whatever.
>
>> Person & email address to contact for further information:
>> [email-masked]
> This does not qualify as "Person & email address".

-- 
Professor Luc Moreau
Electronics and Computer Science   tel:   +44 23 8059 4487
University of Southampton          fax:   +44 23 8059 2865
Southampton SO17 1BJ               email: [email-masked]
United Kingdom                     http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lavm