RFC 1862 (rfc1862) - Page 2 of 27

Report of the IAB Workshop on Internet Information Infrastructure, October 12-14, 1994

RFC 1862                  IAB Workshop Report              November 1995


   gopher, the World Wide Web, naming, WAIS, searching, indexing, and
   library services.  The IAB explicitly tried to balance the number of
   attendees from each area of expertise.  Logistics limited the
   attendance to about 35, which unfortunately meant that many highly
   qualified experts were omitted from the invitation list.

   The objectives of the workshop were to explore the architecture of
   "information" applications on the Internet, to provide the IESG with
   a solid set of recommendations for further work, and to provide a
   place for communication between the communities of people associated
   with the lower and upper layers of the Internet protocol suite, as
   well as allow experience to be exchanged between the communities.

   The 34 attendees divided into three "breakout groups" which met for
   the second half of the first day and the entire second day. Each
   group wrote a report of its activities. The reports are contained in
   this document, in addition to a set of specific recommendations to
   the IESG and IETF community.

2. Summary

   Although there were some disagreements between the groups on specific
   functionalities for architectural components, there was broad
   agreement on the general shape of an information architecture and on
   general principles for constructing the architecture. The discussions
   of the architecture generalized a number of concepts that are
   currently used in deployed systems such as the World Wide Web, but
   the main thrust was to define general architectural components rather
   than focus on current technologies.

   Research recommendations include:

  -  increased focus on a general caching and replication architecture

  -  a rapid deployment of name resolution services, and

  -  the articulation of a common security architecture for information
     applications.

   Procedural recommendations for forwarding this work in the IETF
   include:

  -  making common identifiers such as the IANA assigned numbers
     available in an on-line database

  -  tightening the requirements on Proposed Standards to insure that
     they adequately address security




McCahill, et al              Informational