Call for Participation

1. We appreciate the opportunity to respond to the memorandum dated
January 19, 2001, from Mr. Lee Holcomb, CIO for NASA that asks for VA participation
and enhancement suggestions concerning the government Web site XML.GOV. VA
is pleased to share with you some suggestions for improving the Web site.
These suggestions are:

• VA's webmasters need digital signatures to assure the integrity of
  our Web pages. It is widely understood in the commercial sector that HTML
  is not adequate for the task, so the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
  and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) have turned to XML for a solution.
  The XML-Signature working group has developed an XML compliant syntax for
  representing the signature of Web resources and portions of protocol
  messages and procedures for computing and verifying such signatures. The
  new digital signature standard developed by the IETF and W3C employs XML.
  These documents are available at
  http://www2.ietf.org/proceedings/99mar/slides/trade-xml-99mar/sld013.htm,
  http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/xmldsig-charter.html, and
  http://www.w3.org/Signature/Overview.html.
• VA's webmasters need to share the task of Web site development
  across heterogeneous operating systems and networks. Web sites typically
  gather together information from diverse sources, often from people who are
  geographically separated. Web Document Authoring and Versioning (WEBDAV)
  is an Internet protocol IETF Request for Comment (RFC) 2518 that enables
  compliant servers to share version, and control access for XML pages,
  images, and other information that comprise a Web site. These objects can
  be directly authored by the primary sources of the information. Even for
  sites that use a staging process, WEBDAV provides significant benefit for
  the first stage, where information is first entered into the approval
  process. WEBDAV capable authoring tools can transfer pages from server to
  server along an approval workflow.
• Beyond simple Web page authoring, WEBDAV can serve as a network file
  system suitable for the Internet, one that works on entire files, with good
  performance in high-latency environments. WEBDAV can be used as a protocol
  for manipulating the contents of a document management system via the Web.
  An important goal of WEBDAV is to support virtual enterprises, being the
  primary protocol supporting a wide range of collaborative applications.
  Importantly, a major goal is the support of remote software development
  teams. A final goal of WEBDAV is to leverage the success of HTTP in being
  a standard access layer for a wide range of storage repositories. The
  Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) gives authors read access, while WEBDAV
  provides them write access. Of course this assumes the use of objects that
  can be manipulated as is possible with XML, but not possible with HTML. See
  http://www.webdav.org/other/faq.html and
  http://www.communications.uci.edu/98releases/145ad98.html.
• The Internet Open Trading Protocol (IOTP) provides a data exchange
  format for electronic commerce while integrating existing pure payment
  protocols seamlessly. IOTP provides layered system architecture of some
  generic IOTP application core plus multiple specific payment modules. The
  Payment API uses XML to defines wrapper elements for both the input
  parameters and the API function's response. In particular, the response
  wrapper provides common locations for Error Codes and Error Descriptions.
  For details, please see
  http://www2.ietf.org/proceedings/99mar/slides/trade-xml-99mar/sld011.htm.
• The Intrusion Detection Message Exchange Format (IDMEF) defines data
  formats and exchange procedures for sharing information of interest to
  intrusion detection and response systems, and to the management systems
  which may need to interact with them. The IETF Internet Drafts at
  http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-idwg-idmef-xml-01.txt and
  http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-idwg-xmlsmi-01.txt describe
  a proposed implementation of the data format component of the IDMEF, using
  XML to represent the class hierarchy.
• Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is a set of protocols for
  conducting highly structured inter-organization exchanges, such as for
  making purchases or initiating loan requests. Security such as EDI
  transaction integrity, privacy and non-repudiation in various forms is
  needed to support exchanges by point-to-point, FTP and SMTP protocols.
  There is industry consensus that these heading fields are best described in
  XML.
• The W3C has begun an XML Encryption Activity to specify the
  necessary data model, syntax, and processing to encrypt XML content.
  Applications for XML encryption include exchange of payments and purchase
  orders and other sensitive information.

2. In addition to these suggestions, please replace Mr. Roy Baker with Mr.
Walter Houser as VA's XML subcommittee liaison.

3. If you have any questions, you may contact me at 202-273-8842 or have a
member of your staff contact Walter Houser at 202-273-8012 or
walter.houser@mail.va.gov.

Kathy Ebel for
Robert P. Bubniak
Department of Veterans Affairs
Acting Assistant Secretary for
Information and Technology