Updated Call for Participation, Workshop on Internet naming systems

[IAB Chair <iab-chair@iab.org>]

When the IAB issued the initial call for participation for the upcoming ENAME workshop, several folks pointed out conflicts for potential attendees on the proposed dates.  Among the conflicts were meetings of the DNS Operations, Analysis, and Research Center (OARC),  ISO's technical committee on coded character sets (ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2),  and the Information-Centric Networking Research Group (ICNRG).  After considering these conflicts and others for the times near the original dates, the IAB has decided to change the dates to October 10th and 11th.  Microsoft has kindly offered a venue in Vancouver, British Columbia  for these dates.

Note that the new dates immediately follow both Canadian Thanksgiving and the U.S. Columbus Day holiday.  While this represents a different conflict problem, the IAB has agreed that the overlap with OARC, ICNRG, SC2, and the related meetings were serious enough to accept the trade-off.  In order to minimize the impact of holiday travel to the extent possible, we intend for the workshop to be a half-day on the 10th and a full day on the 11th. 

The updated call for participation is below.

regards,

Ted Hardie

for the IAB

Call for Participation

IAB workshop on Explicit Internet Naming Systems

Internet namespaces rely on Internet connected systems sharing a common set of assumptions on the scope, method of resolution, and uniqueness of the names.    That set of assumption allowed the creation of URIs and other systems which presumed that you could authoritatively identify a service using an Internet name, a service port, and a set of locally-significant path elements.  

There are now multiple challenges to maintaining that commonality of understanding.  

• Some naming systems wish to use URIs to identify both a service and the method of resolution used to map the name to a serving node.  Because there is no common facility for varying the resolution method in the URI structure, those naming systems must either mint new URI schemes for each resolution service or infer the resolution method from a reserved name or pattern.  Both methods are currently difficult and costly, and the effort thus scales poorly.
• Users’ intentions to refer to specific names are now often expressed in voice input, gestures, and other methods which must be interpreted before being put into practice.  The systems which carry on that interpretation often infer which intent a user is expressing, and thus what name is meant, by contextual elements.  Those systems are linked to existing systems who have no access to that context and which may thus return results or create security expectations for an unintended name.

• Unicode allows for both combining characters and composed characters when local language communities have different practices.  When these do not have a single normalization, context is required to determine which to produce or assume in resolution.  How can this context be maintained in Internet systems?

While any of these challenges could easily be the topic of a stand-alone effort, this workshop seeks to explore whether there is a common set of root problems in the explicitness of the resolution context, heuristic derivation of intent, or language matching.   If so, it seeks to identify promising areas for the development of new, more explicit naming systems for the Internet.

We invite position papers on this topic to be submitted by July 28, 2017 to ename@iab.org.    Decisions on accepted submissions will be made by August 11, 2017.

Proposed dates for the workshop are October 10th and 11th, 2017 and the proposed location is Vancouver, British Columbia.  Further logistics will be provided to selected participants.

Ted Hardie

for the IAB