Having a simple discovery method for services and resources is key to enabling many Internet scenarios that require interactions among parties that do not have pre-established relationships. For instance, if Joe, with e-mail address joe@example.com, wants to share his calendar with Mary, then Mary’s calendar service, in the general case, will need to discover the location of Joe’s calendar service. For example, Mary’s calendar service might discover that Joe’s calendar service is located at http://calendars.proseware.com/calendar/joseph by doing discovery for a service named urn:adatum.com:calendar at example.com for the account joe.
Yaron Goland and I are submitting this Simple Web Discovery (SWD) draft for consideration by the community to address this need. SWD is simple to understand and implement, enables different permissions to be applied to discovery of different services, and is JSON-based. I look forward to discussing this with many of you next week at IIW.