Subject: Re: DMA and WebDAV
Becks, Virginia (VBecks@DTIC.MIL)
Date: Wed, 18 Mar 1998 10:22:40 -0500
Message-Id: <57AAB5A137EED011826700805FEAA92B74742D@hq.dtic.mil> From: "Becks, Virginia" <VBecks@DTIC.MIL> To: "'gils@cni.org'" <gils@cni.org> Subject: Re: DMA and WebDAV Date: Wed, 18 Mar 1998 10:22:40 -0500
Owen, Great Info. Are you aware of any GILS representation on the DMA?
Thanks -
Virginia Becks
DTIC
vbecks@dtic.mil
On Tue, March 17, 1998, Owen Ambur <owen_ambur@smtp2.irm.r9.fws.gov> wrote:
>
> FYI -- The following summary comparison of Web Distributed Authoring and
> Versioning (WebDAV) and the Document Management Alliance (DMA) has been
> provided by Chuck Fay of FileNet.
>
> The treatment of "document properties" would seem to be of particular
> interest to the GILS SIG. The DMA defines "document" very broadly,
> while the scope of WebDAV seems to be much more narrowly focused on Web
> "pages".
>
> Owen Ambur, Division of IRM
> U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service
> owen_ambur@fws.gov
>
> -------------------------
>
> First let me characterize each initiative briefly:
>
> WebDAV is focused on defining extensions to the HTTP protocol to allow
> Web authoring tools -- like Microsoft FrontPage and Netscape Navigator
> Gold -- to use standard mechanisms when storing or updating web server
> content. These extensions will cover versioning web server documents,
> locking and unlocking them, and associating attributes with them. WebDAV
> is a working group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), made
> up mainly of software vendors and representatives from the research
> community, notably the Software research group at the University of
> California at Irvine.
>
> The Document Management Alliance (DMA) is an AIIM Task Force with
> the charter to develop a uniform programming model enabling
> enterprise-wide interoperability among document-oriented application
> programs and document management systems (DMSs) from different
> vendors. The primary product of DMA is a specification for an
> integration model and interfaces by which applications and services
> from a rich variety of sources can integrate uniformly into a seamless
> document-management solution. The members of DMA include a diverse
> group of DMS vendor companies, end user companies, governmental
> agencies, industry analysts and consultants, and industry press.
>
> So how do WebDAV and DMA compare with each other? WebDAV is focused
> on adding network protocol support for a limited set of document
> management functions over the Internet. DMA, on the other hand, is
> focused on a comprehensive programming interface that allows uniform
> programmatic access to the full set of capabilities found in leading
> document management systems from different vendors.
>
> WebDAV is currently planned to support
>
> -- version management
> -- locking for overwrite protection
> -- Web page properties
> -- collections of Web resources
> -- name space management (copy/move pages on a Web server)
> -- access control
>
> DMA supports almost all of those capabilities, but to a greater depth than
> WebDAV, plus more:
>
> -- version management
> -- locking for overwrite protection
> -- document properties
> -- containers (like WebDAV collections) for organizing documents
> (i.e., folder management)
> -- name space management (copy/move documents in a DM system)
> -- user authentication
> -- multiple renditions per document (e.g., PDF, TIFF, and Word
> renditions of the same content)
> -- full document and container search capabilities, including
> cross-repository search
> -- international support (different character set encodings and
> locale-specific behavior)
> -- dynamic discovery, for each DMA system, of supported
> - document repositories
> - document classes
> - document properties
> - search capabilities
> - search operators
> - document management features
>
> What does WebDAV cover that DMA does not?
> -- Internet access to documents on web servers
> -- Access control (left by DMA to the underlying DM systems)
>
> How will WebDAV and DMA work together? WebDAV will provide a standard
> path from Web authoring tools to documents on Web servers supporting the
> WebDAV HTTP extensions. WebDAV is designed so that its operations can
> be mapped on the Web server to a broad spectrum of repositories. If
> a WebDAV-enabled Web server is also "DMA-enabled", that is, if it can
> access documents stored on local or remote DMA-enabled document
> repositories, WebDAV can provide a standard path and set of authoring
> and versioning features that are mapped by the web server to any
> DMA-enabled repository. This is a very powerful combination, as it
> potentially provides uniform Internet access to a rich and uniform set
> of versioning, foldering, renditioning, and browsing capabilities across
> document management systems from multiple vendors. WebDAV may also
> support searching extensions in the future, which could be mapped to
> DMA's search model.
>
> (And if you know of anyone who would welcome the opportunity to present
> current, related research on these topics, that would be great too.) You
> may want to contact Jim Whitehead (ejw@ics.uci.edu), a PhD. student at
> UC Irvine who chairs the WebDAV working group. He has already published
> papers on WebDAV and may be interested in another opportunity to present
> his research. If you haven't found it already, the home page for WebDAV
> is http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/webdav/.
>
> You've already found the DMA home page, but here it is again for
> reference: http://www.aiim.org/dma/.
>
> --Chuck Fay
> FileNet Corporation, 3565 Harbor Blvd., Costa Mesa, CA 92626
> phone: (714) 966-3513, fax: (714) 966-3288, email: cfay@filenet.com
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