Service Location Protocol
charter-ietf-svrloc-01

The Service Location Protocol is a decentralized, lightweight, scalable
and extensible protocol for service discovery within a site. It allows
but does not require centralized administration. Even when security,
administrative policies or convenience require centralization (say in
large enterprise deployments) the protocol requires very little
administration. The protocol limits its use of multicast and broadcast
as much as possible to conserve network bandwidth. Moreover, the
protocol is extensible to arbitrary service advertisement and discovery
and supports multiple languages and character set encodings.

The working group will document procedures for discovering services,
and standardize "service:" schemes, which are definitions for resource
and service URLs.

The focus of the working group will be on completing various documents
which describe how to do service discovery and how to standardize
service definitions which will be advertised and discovered.

• Interactions between Service Location Protocol and other enterprise
  naming and directory service protocols will be explored, defined,
  and standardized.

• Schemes for popular services will be discussed, and standardization
  efforts with other working groups explored as needed.

• Operational experiences and security procedures will be discussed
  and documented as best current practice.

• Service Type attribute definitions will be standardized by
  registering a 'Service Template' with IANA. This document will
  also describe how Service Types and Directory Schemas can be made
  interoperable. The Service Location Protocol can then be used to
  populate a directory service dynamically.

• An Application Programmers Interface has been developed to allow
  a uniform mechanism for applications to make use of Service Location
  Protocol functions, which will be supplied as an informational
  document.

• The Service Location Protocol itself will be revised and improved
  on, continuing it along the standards track.