In order to move our work on the MMOX charter along, and in view of the lack
of further input on the latest version for some days now, I have taken
Infinity's comments as being strongly substantive and therefore have added
words to express the goal of open, non-proprietary ownership.  The first
paragraph of the charter had already mentioned that proprietary protocols
were used in the past, and therefore this is an appropriate place to insert
that our work seeks an open, non-proprietary alternative.

Note that I have not revised the phrase "application-layer wire protocol" as
we do not appear to have converged on a good alternative form of expression
yet.  Possibly there is no need.

This new draft below becomes our latest version.  The previous first
paragraph has been expanded slightly as explained above, and the LL
implementation-specific RFC about simulators has been removed from MMOX
milestones as per my previous submission (containing the reasons for the
change) which did not elicit comment:




>> Description of Working Group:
>>
>> Virtual Worlds and other Massively Multi-Party Online Applications are of
>> increasing interest to the Internet community.  Numerous examples exist of
>> such applications, mostly 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 been several ad
>> hoc efforts since 2007 to develop interoperability. We believe that this
>> goal will now benefit from a formal, established process defining open,
>> non-proprietary standards as infrastructure for virtual world
>> interoperability.
>>
>> 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 identity providers, 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 a set of application
>> protocols to communicate and interact with the state of Virtual World
>> applications. Foundational protocols will be evaluated for: 1) representing
>> application layer objects and serializing messages between these objects, 2)
>> providing a messaging abstraction layer to support the unique needs of VW
>> interactions, and 3) authenticating protocol endpoints. An attempt will be
>> made to use existing standards wherever possible. For example, image data is
>> typed and transferred using MIME and HTTP; message serializations are
>> encoded in XML and JSON.
>
>
>> The MMOX working group is not proposing the standardization of any one
>> complete protocol, but the definition of a extensible core protocol with
>> additional layers of agreed functionality as they are developed. Because the
>> foundational protocols can be deployed 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:
>>
>> August 2009 Rough consensus on a set of base VW protocols
>> October 2009  Publication of LLSD Draft as an Informational RFC
>> February 2010 Progression of base VW protocols to a Proposed Standard
>> February 2010 Progression of Virtual World Primitive Object Format to
>> Proposed Standard
>> February 2010 Rough consensus on a VW Authentication and VW Teleport
>> protocol
>> June 2010 Progression of VW Authentication to Proposed Standard
>> June 2010 Progression of VW Teleport to Proposed Standard
>>
>




>
>> Ideally we should have some representatives from other virtual worlds
> taking part throughout this work, including at this early charter creation
> stage, but in their absence the burden of keeping our goals and protocols
> applicable to more than just the SL family of worlds falls on our own
> shoulders.  I think that these modifications have probably put us on the
> right track at least.
>
> Morgaine.
>