Discovery of Agents, Workloads, and Named entities
bofreq-farrel-discovery-of-agents-workloads-and-named-entities-08

Document Type Approved BOF request
Title Discovery of Agents, Workloads, and Named entities
Last updated 2026-06-12
State Approved
Editor Adrian Farrel
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bofreq-farrel-discovery-of-agents-workloads-and-named-entities-08

Name: Discovery of Agents, Workloads, and Named entities (DAWN)

Description

Many distributed processing environments depend on the interaction
between components that do not have pre-configured capability,
location, or reachability relationships. In order for these systems
to operate correctly, the components must be able to discover each
other. For complete generality, we call these components "entities".
Entities may be tasks, workloads, endpoints, services, AI agents, etc.

In each case, an entity needs knowledge of other entities before
interaction can proceed: what they are, what they offer, and whether
they can be trusted. Such knowledge could be obtained through static
configuration, but this approach is impractical at scale and across
organisational boundaries. Existing discovery mechanisms, particularly
those used for service or endpoint discovery, provide only limited
information such as basic identity and reachability. More advanced
entity discovery use cases may require discovery of richer descriptive
properties such as the tasks an entity is able to undertake, supported
interaction modes and protocols, and lifecycle properties.

An automated and interoperable discovery mechanism is needed that builds
on existing protocols and tools, benefits from established trust models,
supports proven delegation and federation architectures, and allows
organisations to independently publish discovery information.

Providing a decentralised and interoperable discovery mechanism is
essential to protecting the openness of the Internet and protecting
against dominance by a single or a small number of providers. It will
also facilitate interoperability between systems of entities from
different sources. Integral to this is building a governance system
for the registration of entities.

This BoF seeks to build consensus around establishing a working group
to develop requirements, information models, and protocol solutions for
entity discovery.

Required Details

Information for IAB/IESG

To allow evaluation of your proposal, please include the following items:

Agenda

Draft agenda:

  1. Administrivia and purpose of the BoF (Chairs and ADs) [5 : 5/120]
  2. Scene-setting, terminology, and problem statement (Arashmid Akhavain) [15 : 20/120]
    • Show common discovery needs of different entity types
  3. Overview of classes of use cases (Kehan Yao) [10 : 30/120]
    • Categories of discover and classes of use cases to identify commonalities
  4. Solution requirements (Dan King) [10 : 40/120]
    • Explain solution-independent discovery protocol requirements
  5. Potential solution space (Jim Mozley) [10 : 50/120]
    • Introduce a number of suggested solutions
  6. Draft charter (Jim Mozley) [10 : 60/120]
  7. Open discussion (All) [55 : 115/120]
    • Some big topics for discussion
    • The usual BoF questions
  8. Wrap-up / Next steps (Chairs and ADs) [5 : 120/120]