RE: Back to terminology

Jorge,

it seems to me like a lot of the discussion following your response
to Kenji's and my comments, was geared more towards requirements (and
scope of the working group) than towards terminology. I'm not
sure I fully understand the process here - is there going to be a
separate I-D on the terminology, or will the terminology bit be
the basis for a requirement I-D?

Anyway, I'll try to respond to your email, just concentrating on
the pure terminology, and avoiding any discussion of scope and
requirements.

Jorge wrote:

> In principle, I do agree. In an abstract view, there is no difference
> between ultimate location recipients or location servers:
> they just react to
> the policies of the owner. But when you look more concretely
> and you are
> worried about how things will be implemented, a difference
> appears. You may
> argue that the difference I am making is not at the abstract
> requirements
> level, but is biased towards an implementation. Yes, perhaps
> I would agree,
> but still I think we need to do this. It all depends on your
> abstraction
> level. As soon as the requirements are concrete enough that
> to the point
> where you say: "the location recipient has to verify the
> authenticity of the
> policies of the owner", this distinction becomes important.

[...]

> My intention was to have Location Receivers to be exactly the
> disjoint union
> of Location Servers and Ultimate Location Receivers. (I do
> not think that
> one of the three terms is redundant).

I have no problem with distinguishing between a Location Server
and an Ultimate Location Receivers. I guess I'm just not too
happy about the choice of terms. How about a "Location Receiver"
that can either be an "Ultimate Location Receiver" or an
"Intermediate Location Receiver"? This would make it clearer
that "Location Receiver" is the more general term, and the other
two are specializations thereof (or, as you put it, the LR
is the disjoint union of ULR and ILR).

Jorge wrote:

> OK. My distinction between the different types of Location Recipients
> ("private", "lawful" (= "regulatory") and "operational") is
> quite premature.
> At some point or other we will have to consider that not all types of
> recipients will be subject to the same laws or policies (as
> Axel writes: ...
> these [policies] would specify that certain properly
> authenticated "lawful
> location recipients" are always authorized to get any
> location information
> they ask for. These policies would have a higher priority
> than those of the
> "owner", i.e. the owner cannot override them.). I anticipate
> that not only
> "lawful" (= "regulatory") location recipients but also
> "operational" ones
> will be treated differently than ordinary ones. In this case
> I agree, this
> distinctions do not have to be made yet, (and perhaps are not
> the correct
> ones).

OK, then we'd have another distinction between different types of
Location Recipients, depending on their legal roles. This
distinction would be orthogonal to the distinction between
"Intermediate" and "Ultimate". Having them in the terminology
won't harm us, it remains to be seen if we will actually need
to make use of this distinction.

You have singled out "lawful/regulatory" as well as "access
network operators" as cases that may need special treatment,
I guess all the rest would be "private" (not the greatest term,
either, since a network operator in most cases will also be
a private entity, but I wouldn't have a better suggestion).
Are we reasonably sure we haven't missed out on anyone? I must
say I still have my doubts that the "access network operator"
does require a special kind of treatment. It should not be
entitled to "override" the privacy preferences of the "owner"
(whereas the "lawful/regulatory" should be able to).

Axel
Received on Thu Feb 21 04:05:38 2002