The Event Notification Service BOF was held at the Chicago IETF, on Tuesday,
August 25, 1998, from 9AM-10AM. There were 110 people in attendance.
The meeting was chaired by Jim Whitehead, and minutes were taken by Francois
Menard. Adam Rifkin began the BOF with a presentation giving a brief report from
the Workshop on Internet Scale Event Notifications (WISEN), held at U.C. Irvine in
July, 1998, along with an overview of a scenarios document authored by Adam and
Rohit Khare. Next, Surendra Reddy presented requirements for a Web notifications
service, based on his internet-draft. Rohit Khare began a discussion of a proposed
charter with a presentation outlining possibilities for how to structure the charter.
Unfortunately, due to time constraints, Rohit was unable to fully present his proposed
charter in order to have open microphone time during the BOF.
In the final 10 minutes of the BOF, the microphone was opened up for discussion from
the participants. One participant noted that this service, as described, would be a boon
for denial of service attacks. Several participants notes that the scope of the activity
seemed large, and should be reduced to make the problem more tractable. A related
comment was that it seemed that perhaps a family of protocols is needed, one for
subscriptions, delivery, etc. A comment was made that reliable delivery of
notifications was not addressed in the presentations, but is an important concern.
Another comment notes that this effort should begin by defining a notification
description language to define what is meant by a notification. Finally, several
comments asked that we define on which substrate these notifications would be
delivered: is this strictly notifications for the Web, or would email be included, etc.
At the end of the meeting, a straw poll of the audience asked whether the IETF should
continue to work in this area to reduce the scope of this effort, with an eventual view
toward forming an IETF working group. About half the participants responded yes to
this. A second poll of the audience found that appx. 28 participants are willing
themselves to work on this topic.
The web page for the group, including slides presented during the BOF, is available at:
http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/notify/
Discussion for the group will take place on the mailing list: notification@makelist.com,
with hypertext archives available at: http://www.findmail.com/list/notification/
Notify BOF Charter-Bashing
Scenarios