Request for comments: "Origin of Document Species" and "Trust Mgmt"

I Find Karma (adam@cs.caltech.edu)
Wed, 4 Feb 1998 11:53:51 -0800


The two papers Rohit and I had accepted for the WWW7 conference

http://www7.conf.au/

need to be submitted camera-ready by the end of the week. If you
send me comments on either of the papers, I'll try to incorporate
them before we submit the papers.

1. "The Origin of (Document) Species"

http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~adam/papers/xml/origin-of-species.html

2. "Trust Management on the World Wide Web"

http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~adam/papers/www/trust-management-2.html

which itself was adapted from the 10-page

http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~adam/papers/www/trust-management.html

which itself summarizes and adds some information to the 40-page survey

http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~adam/papers/trust.html

The abstracts appear below.

-- Adam

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1. Abstract for "The Origin of (Document) Species"

The World Wide Web's extraordinary reach is based in part on its open
assimilation of document formats. Although Web transfer protocols and
addressing can accommodate any kinds of resources, the unique
application context of a truly global hypermedia system favors the
adoption of certain Web-adapted formats. In this paper we consider the
evolutionary record that has led to the ascent of the eXtensible Markup
Language (XML).

We present a taxonomy of document species in the Web according to their
syntax, style, structure, and semantics. We observe the preferential
adoption of SGML, CSS, HTML, and XML, respectively, which leverage a
parsimonious evolutionary strategy favoring declarative encodings over
Turing-complete languages; separable styles over inline formatting;
declarative markup over presentational markup; and well-defined
semantics over operational behavior.

The paper concludes with an evolutionary walkthrough of citation
formats. Ultimately, combined with the self-referential power of the
Web to document itself, we believe XML can catalyze a critical shift of
the Web from a global information space into a universal knowledge
network.

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2. Abstract for "Trust Management on the World Wide Web"

As once-proprietary mission-specific information systems migrate onto
the Web, traditional security analysis cannot sufficiently protect each
subsystem atomically. The Web encourages open, decentralized systems
that span multiple administrative domains. Trust Management is an
emerging framework for decentralizing security decisions that helps
developers and others in asking "why" trust is granted rather than
immediately focusing on "how" cryptography can enforce it.

In this paper, we recap the basic elements of Trust Management:
principles, principals, and policies. We present pragmatic details of
Web-based TM technology for identifying principals, labeling resources,
and enforcing policies. We sketch how TM might be integrated into Web
applications for document authoring and distribution, content filtering,
and mobile code security. Finally, we measure today's Web protocols,
servers, and clients against this model, culminating in a call for
stakeholders' support in bringing automatable TM to the Web.

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----
adam@cs.caltech.edu

(lesson learned: never use ordinal numbers in fragment-identifiers)
-- Dan Connolly