Subject: FW: Description & Agenda for HFN-BOF (Human Friendly Names)

From: "Larry Masinter" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 2 Dec 1998 00:52:29 PST

(please reply-to: [email-masked])

Since this topic was discussed earlier on [email-masked], and
I promised more info: the BOF is scheduled for Friday morning

Schedule
--------- 
The BOF was listed on Monday, due to a mixup, but has
been moved to Friday morning, December 11, in the
Ft. Lauderdale room.

BOF Description
---------------
The notion of a "Human Friendly Naming scheme" (HFN) has been
discussed in a variety of contexts, as an alternative to the use of
URIs or URNs as a way of designating Internet resources (see [RFC
2276], for example).

A number of companies and systems have already deployed
"friendly name" systems of various sorts; are there standards
that would allow for interoperability between them?

The principal kinds of systems of interest are:

   a) databases of 'friendly names', such as company names,
    trademarks, book titles, personal names
    (RealNames, Netscape Internet Keywords, AOL Go Words,
     Dun & Bradstreet company name database, etc.)
   b) browsers and other Internet access software tools that
    allow a user to type in a 'name' or match substring
    as if it were a resource name or locator
    (Any tool with an 'open location' box, including web
    browsers but possibly others)
   c) search systems that wish to also offer name matching
    when the search criteria is simple
    (Internet search sites or portals such as Alta Vista, Lycos,
     etc.)

Can the network protocols between these systems be standardized
in order to allow for interoperability between the many databases
and the users of those databases?

There are several Internet Drafts as contributions to this BOF:

 draft-mealling-human-friendly-identifier-req-00.txt 
   might form the start of a "requirements" document for what
   we want to accomplish
 draft-mealling-human-friendly-identifer-arch-00.txt
   is a possible start on an architecture for friendly name
   identification
 draft-popp-realname-hfn-00.txt is an example of a kind of
 'friendly' identifier described as a mapping to URLs and URNs

In addition, RFC 2345 is another example of a 'friendly name'
database and a simple protocol for accessing it.

BOF Agenda (tentative)
----------------------
 Introduction & agenda bashing	 Cliff Lynch        5 minutes
 Problem space description   Larry Masinter           10 minutes
 (Internationalization, fuzzy matching, avoiding TLD morass)
 Prior work on HFNs        Karen Sollins              10 minutes

 Presentation of I-Ds & RFCs listed above:
      Requirements              Michael Mealling      15 minutes
      Architecture              Michael Mealling      15 minutes
      Real Names                Nico Popp             15 minutes
      Company Names             Ted Wolf              15 minutes

   Discussion of charter (see description above)      20 minutes
   Call for participation                              5 minutes

BOF Chair
---------
  Cliff Lynch

Mailing list
------------
[email-masked]. Send 'subscribe' to [email-masked]'
(HFI = Human Friendly Identifier, another name^h^h^h^hidentifier for
the proposed working group.)

---

From: "Larry Masinter" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 2 Dec 1998 00:52:29 PST

Schedule
--------- 

BOF Description
---------------

BOF Agenda (tentative)
----------------------

BOF Chair
---------
  Cliff Lynch

Mailing list
------------