Dear Participants,

As we move forward, I thought it would be useful to have some  
documents to discuss.

First off... the objective for this list and for the meeting at the  
74th ietf in San Francisco is to a) gauge overall support for the idea  
of an IETF WG focused on virtual world interoperability and b)  
identify a few deliverables we should be working towards. In support  
of this objective, the following draft working group charter has been  
proposed. This is a copy of what you'll find on the IETF wiki at http://trac.tools.ietf.org/bof/trac/wiki/MmoxCharter 
  .

Draft Charter for MMOX Working Group

The following is a proposed draft charter for the MMO/Virtual World  
Interchange (MMOX) Working Group. It is important to understand that  
this is a _draft_ and the authors are currently seeking substantive  
input from the technical community.

The IETF is the right forum for this work because this work will have  
a close interaction with existing IETF RFCs and STDs, the IETF has a  
diversity of viewpoints and experience to ensure a successful  
protocol, and the IETF has a IPR policy suitable to creation of a  
viable vendor-neutral suite of standards. Therefore, we are requesting  
a BoF session at IETF 74 to agree on a working group charter.

Working Group Name:
Massively Multi-participant Online Technologies

Chairs:
Meadhbh S. Hamrick <infinity@lindenlab.com>
David Lavine <dwl@watson.ibm.com>

Area and Area Directors:
Applications Area
Lisa Dussealt <lisa@osafoundation.org>
Chris Newman <chris.newman@sun.com>

Responsible Area Director:
Lisa Dussealt <lisa@osafoundation.org>

Mailing List:
mmox@ietf.org

Description of Working Group:

Virtual Worlds and other Massively Multi-Party Online Applications are  
of increasing interest to the internet community. Innumerable examples  
exist of such applications, most using proprietary protocols. With  
their roots in games and social interaction, Virtual Worlds are now  
being increasingly used in business, education and information  
exchange. With a user base expected to grow to beyond 50 million by  
2011, creators of such systems have begun to look at ways to make such  
systems interoperate. There have have been several ad hoc efforts  
since 2007 to develop interoperability. We believe the process would  
now benefit from a formal, established process.

The objective of the MMOX working group is to provide an application- 
layer wire protocol for Virtual Worlds to a) enable interoperability  
between applications, b) provide for access and exchange with other  
systems on the internet such as web services, e-mail and other  
information storage systems, c) allow network layers to recognize VW  
traffic and make routing decisions based on its characteristics.`

The core work of the group will be the production of the Open Grid  
Protocol suite (OGP), a set of application protocols to communicate   
and interact with the state of Virtual World applications.  
Foundational protocols in OGP include the publication of: 1) LLSD, an  
abstract type system for representing application layer objects along  
with serialization rules for protocol messages between these objects.  
2) OGP Base, a messaging abstraction to support the unique needs of VW  
interactions. 3) Guidelines for using a PKIX compliant X.509  
infrastructure to authenticate protocol endpoints. The OGP protocol  
suite makes use, where ever possible, of existing, established  
standards. For example, image data is typed and transfered using MIME  
and HTTP; serializations are encoded in XML and JSON.

The MMOX working group is not proposing the standardization of any one  
complete proprietary protocol, but the definition of a extensible core  
protocol and layers of agreed functionality as they are developed.  
Because the OGP suite is layered upon a core that is deployable before  
the entire range of VW functions is considered, we believe that the  
efforts of the MMOX working group are achievable within a reasonable  
time frame.

Goals and Milestones:

October 2009	Publication of LLSD Draft as an Informational RFC
October 2009	Publication of the PKIX Profile for Inter-Simulator  
Communicaton Draft as an Informational RFC
February 2010	Progression of OGP Base and Event Queue to Proposed  
Standard
February 2010	Progression of OGP Virtual World Primitive Object Format  
to Proposed Standard
June 2010		Progression of OGP Authentication to Proposed Standard
June 2010		Progression of OGP Teleport to Proposed Standard