Internet2 Fall Member Meeting

What are the next steps for the VidMid VC group now that H.350 has been ratified?

One area is liaison work with the VoIP, instant messaging and Shibboleth working groups. The Shibboleth group is looking at non-web scenarios and VidMid VC could work with them on a federated approach to authentication and authorization.

There is a need to document in a cookbook what it takes to get H.350 into a directory, and how to manage the space. The URI needs to also be documented in some manner. The cookbook is currently written for an audience who runs video conferencing services rather than enterprise directory audience.

With the new medical privacy requirements HIPAA, what is required to secure videoconferencing for medical applications is also an area to explore.

What are the requirements for setting up a conference? How do you notify users that a conference is happening and get them the proper information to connect to a conference, etc? There is a need for a mechanism/location where someone can go to set up a conference, notify attendees, supply a pin, a clickable invitation etc. There are some commercial solutions but no open source ones.

There is also a security component, which is where the middleware aspect comes into play. You want to locate a person and have some degree of confidence that you have found the correct person. How can we bring a higher degree of integrity to the process? On a videoconference who is allowed to speak, and have write access? How do you deliver that information to the environment? How do you prevent someone intercepting a videoconference? A white paper that outlines the case for why what we have is not adequate and why it needs to be corrected would of use.

Vcomp is one possible approach. A vcomp file is basically H.350 in a file. A little list of colon delimited records. It may be possible to graft conferencing and scheduling onto it and have a token that goes back to scheduling server, grabs text file and it links to conference.

A directory of directories (DoD) could go out and find all the MCU's. Would that be a possible project? One issue is that universities don't want to open their directories to crawling for security and traffic reasons. A centralized DoD could be used to handle the resource discovery issue.

Scenarios need to be developed outlining implications and requirements, and what technologies current exist to support:

vcomp and how it would be used
conference management and things like read only or restricted conferences, including security and resource discovery.

Tyler Johnson of UNC – Chapel Hill gave a brief update on the ITU. UNC is a member of study group 16 and can sponsor submissions to that group. VidMid VC is invited to submit a proposal on data collaboration standards. The ITU also requests proposals for federated authentication models for video and VoIP.

Nadim El-Khoury of UNC will take a first pass at developing some scenarios.