Collection Level Description

A review of existing practice

...an eLib supporting study

4. Service Description

4.2 WASRV

The WASRV (Wide Area Service Location) working group [WASRV] was a proposed IETF WG that was tasked with defining an architecture for locating services on the Internet. The working group now appears to be dormant. However the following attributes were identified as being required for service location.

Owner	The owner of the site. This would be more than just a domain name, but would be organisation name.
Content-Owner	In cases of Web hosting, the owner of the content is more useful than the Web site owner. This also would be an organisation name rather than an address.
Cost	Cost to use the service.
Geographic-Location	This is different from distance metrics, but would be useful in some gateway searches.
Service-URL	If the service has a valid URL, put it here.
Service	If the service does not have a valid URL, the protocol would be specified here, along with the fully qualified domain name in Server-Name and port number in Server-Port.
Server-Name	FQDN of host server.
Server-Port	Port on host server.
Description	A short description of the service
Protocol-Version	The latest protocol version supported.
Availability	A specification of when the service is available (most often 7x24 but could be less for things like anonymous ftp)
Signature	A signature of the template for authentication, checkable by the certificate specified in Certificate. The Signature covers everything in the template (including the Certificate but the Signature attribute and should be the last attribute in the template. Stored in base64 encoding.
Certificate	A URL for downloading the certificate for checking a Signature attribute

Taken from message by Ryan Moats to WASRV mailing list.

Andy Powell, UKOLN