DAV Searching and Locating (dasl) Charter

DAV Searching and Locating (dasl)

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Description of Working Group:
The goal of this working group is to define and develop an extensible DAV Searching and Locating protocol as an application of HTTP. The working group will define protocol elements that enable server-executed queries to locate resources based upon their property values and text content as expressed by the DAV data model.

Problem Definition

WEBDAV and HTTP enable client-side searching by defining a simple set of mechanisms (the PROPFIND and GET methods) to locate those resources meeting client-defined criteria. These mechanisms can be inefficient, do not adequately deal with some simple content-based queries, and do not take advantage of the advanced querying and caching capabilities of modern storage systems.

The DASL Protocol will enable a HTTP/1.1 compliant scheme for server-side searching to address these limitations. The working group will define the following for a server-side searching mechanism:

How to express the search: the syntax and semantics of a query
How to focus the query by identifying its scope
How to discover the search capability of a resource.
The syntax for the search results

Working Group Scope

A generalized search mechanism is a broad problem space. It encompasses a variety of object models, typing schemes, and media. By focusing on a subset of this space, the problem of locating resources based on property values and text content, the working group will leverage much of the existing work that has been done on querying under simple property and resource models.

In-Scope items include:

typing
comparisons (greater than,greater than or equal to, less than, less than or equal to, !=, ==)
internationalized content
text content matching
dealing with arbitrary XML values

Out-of-scope items include:

definitions of well-known properties
server-to-server communication protocols
cross-language comparisons
searching for non-text content (images, video, audio, etc.)
client control of server administration (e.g. indexing)

Deliverables

The final output of this working group is expected to be two documents:

(1) A requirements document, that describes the high-level functional requirements for DASL, including rationale. This will be an Informational document.

(2) A protocol specification describing the additions to HTTP (new methods, headers, request bodies, and response bodies) needed to implement the DASL requirements. This will be a Standards Track document.