ISO work?

mskuhn@immd4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de (Markus Kuhn)

14 Aug 91 12:59:27 GMT

CSD., University of Erlangen, Germany

Newsgroups: comp.mail.multi-media mskuhn@immd4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de (Markus Kuhn) writes: >There is an OSI protocol called "group communication" in development >at the International Standards Organisation (ISO). [...] I got a lot of mail, asking for further information. The only publications, I've found about these efforts so far are articles from Research into Networks and Distributed Applications, R. Speth (Editor), Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. (North-Holland), (c) ECSC,EEC,EAEC, Brussels and Luxembourg, 1988. It contains reports from the AMIGO and COSMOS teams. Jacob Palme, a member of the ISO/CCITT study group ist regularly posting short summeries from the study group meatings in comp.protocols.iso.x400. I've copied parts of some of them below. I am _very_ interested in other information and publications about ISO group communication. Do you have any pointers? Markus --------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: JPALME@qz.qz.se (Jacob Palme QZ) Date: 13 Mar 91 04:45:42 GMT Newsgroups: comp.protocols.iso.x400 Subject: Report from X.400 development group meeting February 1991 X.400 development group notes ============================= The joint ISO/IEC (JTC 1/SC 18/WG 4), CCITT (Study Group VII, Question 18) group and CCITT (Study Group I, question 15) for further development of the X.400/MOTIS standard for electronic mail met in Wollongong, Australia, February 13-22, 1991. These are my personal notes from the meeting, no official minutes. [...] Group communication ------------------- The group communication subgroup has specified a general information model for group communication and an abstract service definition for computer conferencing. The work on mapping computer conferencing on the general information model is not yet finished. Future work includes finishing this mapping, further work on the distributed architecture and development of ASN.1 and protocols. Not yet clarified issues are whether to only use the master-shadow technique for updating, whether to represent links as separate link objects or not, how to name contributions. A main issue in the group communication group is still whether to produce a special protocol for computer conferencing, or only produce a general protocol for group communication and map computer conferencing on the general protocol. Another main issue is how to obtain downwards compati- bility with X.400 (88). This might be possible by using some clever, but possibly unintuitive, coding of group communication contents transported via MTS. Murray Turoff help us with Group Communication? ---------------------------------------------- We heard rumours that the U.S. intended to send Murray Turoff, the man who invented computer conferencing, as a representative to future Study Group I/Question 15 meetings. This is a very happy rumour, if it is true. I have for several years tried to persuade Turoff to participate in this work. There may be some difficulties however, if Turoff comes in as a new participant so late in the work. Will he want to redo everything we have done before he starts to participate? From: JPALME@QZ.qz.se (Jacob Palme QZ) Date: 1 Jul 91 16:54:28 GMT Newsgroups: comp.protocols.iso.x400 Subject: ISO/CCITT X.400 group report Notes from the joint ISO/CCITT meeting on X.400 development =========================================================== Ottawa, Canada, June 1991. These are my personal notes, no official minutes. [...] Group communication ------------------- The group communication subgroup decided tentatively to split its future standards into two different standards: (a) A general group communication model. (b) A basic computer conferencing model. Neither will be ready very soon. Possibly, they might be ready for CD ballot in 1993. CD ballot is the first time a new standard proposal is sent out to solicit comments. CD means Committee Document, and is followed by a DIS (Draft International Standard) and finally an IS (International Standard). These CD ballots will not include support for advanced group communication tasks such as voting and joint editing. Such supports will probably not be ready for CD ballot until 1995. In the Group Communication subgroup, Murray Turoff, one of the world's foremost experts on computer conferencing, participated for the first time. This means that much time was spent aligning our terminology ( = learning to understand each other) and finding similarities and differences in our models. The major unresolved differences were: (a) Turoff wants to name contributions relative to the conference, while our previous work has planned for conference-independent naming. A consequence of this is that our previous model allows for the same contri- bution to be sent simultaneously to several conferences. With Turoff's model, a contribution will always be sent to one major conference, but links to it can be set up from other conferences. (b) Turoff wants to handle membership lists as explicit objects, while we previously planned for such lists to be derived from sets of membership links. [...] Next study period coming up --------------------------- The next CCITT study period is soon coming up, so proposals for issues to be handled in the messaging standards group during the next study period should be input to study group VII or to VII/Q.18 soon now. [...] --- Markus Kuhn, Computer Science student -- University of Erlangen, Germany X.400: G=Markus;S=Kuhn;OU1=rrze;OU2=cnve;P=uni-erlangen;A=dbp;C=de I'net: mskuhn@immd4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de