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Server Description #355

Description

@csarven

Background: there are a wide-range of use cases that needs to get a hold of authoritative information about the server. To date, there is no uniform way for agents and applications to find all information about a server.

General use case:
Find authoritative information about a server.

Use cases:

  • Guinan wants to read the description of the server and understand its purpose.
  • Janeway wants to find the server's policies to review its data privacy and pledge for resource persistence.
  • Uhura wants to check the server's communication options in order to use a preferred notification protocol.
  • Seven of Nine wants to determine a suitable location to keep astrometric data from the server's available storages.
  • Picard wants to find the server's contact information to request a diplomatic meeting about security audits.
  • Torres wants her devices to use server's URI templates when naming particular kinds of resources.

There are many others.. which may be low-priority or already have existing standards, but could be captured in this data nevertheless, e.g., sitemap, Web syndication, robots control.

General requirement:
Discovery mechanism and data model to express authoritative information about the server.

Specific requirement:

  • Server advertises the location of the authoritative information.
  • Server generates the authoritative information.
  • Server controls the authoritative information.

Considerations:

  • Accommodating various use cases that needs to get a hold of authoritative information about the server.
  • Should the authoritative information about the server be publicly discoverable?
  • Should the authoritative information about the server be publicly readable or access controlled?
  • Can specific class of agents (e.g., owners) claim/update authoritative information about the server?
  • Should the authoritative information about the server be discoverable from root path, storage, any resource, and/or somewhere else?
  • Caching.

Related issues (sample):

Notes:
The authoritative information about the server would be a specialisation of #authoritative-information in #352 .

Activity

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