#FOSP Specification
This is the official, work in progress documentation of the Federated Object Sharing Protocol (FOSP).
The Federated Object Storage Protocol (FOSP) is an application-level protocol for exchanging structured and unstructured data generated by users of different providers. It is designed to fulfill the needs of online social networks by combining necessary features into one simple protocol.
FOSP aims to provide three core features:
- Store data online and support standard operations on it.
- Enforce access control on the data, for users from different hosts, without central authentication.
- Notify users when data is added, removed or has changed.
Furthermore, some non-functional requirements are imposed. The protocol needs to be data agnostic and should support structured, unstructured and metadata. It also must be as simple as possible, e.g. it must be easy to implement and it should be possible to write easy to deploy applications for it.
To compile the xml files into a txt file or a html file the xml2rfc utility is needed. Compilation to pdf furthermore requires the imagemagic library (or more specifically the convert binary), groff, pstops (psutils) and ghostscript (the ps2pdf binary).
The Makefile has three targets. The txt target will compile the XML to the standardt RFC text format. The html target produces an HTML version. The pdf target produces an PDF version. By default, all targets are run.
I need feedback! If you read some of it or even all of it I would be happy to hear your opinion. I do not only need technical feedback but also I'd like to know if there are:
- spelling or grammar mistakes
- sentences that do not sound like proper English or are otherwise incomprehensible
- sentences that do not make sense or are probably wrong
- information that is missing to fully understand a section
- information that is, or seems to be, missing in the whole document
- sections (or the whole document) that could be rearranged to make them easier to understand
- concepts that seem to be too complicated / not complicated enough
- features that are missing
- potential security issuses (there sure are, some are tradeoffs)
I will also gladly hear about anything you like about it or dislike about it and any ideas how to improve it / make it simpler. Just sent me an e-mail or open an issue.
Copyright (C) 2015 Felix Maurer (Felix.Maurer@student.kit.edu)