The BOF was held to discuss the need for a document describing current technology and practice related to searching, lookups, and discovery. The chairs proposed that such a document would need to main sections one identifying current mechanisms and one describing their applicability. The chairs stressed that the task could only succeed if it avoided discussions of general requirements, new protocols, or the relative ranking of different protocols. The DNS is the best current example-the name is the key and the hierarchy of DNS servers provide a mechanism for returning information based on the key.
Searches are the most problematic case, especially when done globally.
Searches are often considered successful when they return a key which allows for a lookup. In both cases, identifying the scope of particular protocols and mechanisms was seen as critical to success, as was avoiding using that discussion of scope to rank the protocols. LDAP is intended primarily for search and lookup, not discovery. LSD is looking at interconnects between LDAP servers and at locating LDAP servers. SRV is now in BIND, Microsoft's DNS code, and Cisco's DNS code.