From: Mike Dean (mdean@bbn.com)
Date: 04/25/01
This is an issue that's been concerning me for a while: The US Department of Defense runs several large classified operational networks (including SIPRNET) that are physically separated from the Internet and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. They use DNS, but with their own naming conventions, e.g. most SIPRNET hosts end in .mil.smil. Many DAML tools expect to be able to find out more information about ontologies, etc. by dereferencing URIs, including www.w3.org, www.daml.org, and application sites. These unclassified sites won't be accessible on these networks. The normal practice would probably be to rehost these URIs at, say, www.daml.mil.smil, but this is likely to be a configuration management nightmare for any URIs embedded in software (including RDF parsers, reasoners, etc.). I see a couple likely solutions: 1) Take steps now to get copies of critical www.w3.org, www.daml.org, and other pages available on these networks using their normal names (the home pages could clearly indicate that these are limited copies, so as not to confuse/worry anybody). 2) If that's not politically feasible, pre-load copies of these pages in cacheing proxies at user sites. This is a much less scalable solution. Am I missing anything? I don't think this is an insurmountable problem, but it will require some planning. I think the problem is pretty unique to DoD. Mike
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