Skip to main content

Concluded WG Open Grid Protocol (ogpx)

Note: The data for concluded WGs is occasionally incorrect.

WG Name Open Grid Protocol
Acronym ogpx
Area Applications Area (app)
State Concluded
Charter charter-ietf-ogpx-01 Approved
Document dependencies
Personnel Chairs Barry Leiba, Jon Peterson, Meadhbh Hamrick

Final Charter for Working Group

Virtual Worlds (VWs) and other Massively Multi-Party Online Applications
(MMOs) are of increasing interest to the Internet community. Innumerable
examples exist of such applications, most using proprietary protocols.
With their roots in games and social interaction, Virtual Worlds are now
being used increasingly in business, education and information exchange.
With a growing user base, creators of such systems are interested in
developing a standard virtual worlds protocol to enable interoperability.

The objective of the OGPX working group is to provide an
application-layer wire protocol for Virtual Worlds to a) enable
interoperability between applications, b) provide for access and
exchange with other systems on the internet such as web services, e-mail
and other information storage systems, c) allow network layers to
recognize VW traffic and make routing decisions based on its
characteristics. The Open Grid Protocol (OGP) describes semantics and
protocol interaction for the virtual world, independent of transport,
though bindings for carrying OGP over HTTP are defined.

The core work of the group will be the production of the Open Grid
Protocol suite (OGP), a set of application protocols to communicate and
interact with the state of Virtual World applications. The Open Grid
Protocol defines virtual worlds with the following assumptions:

the Virtual World exists independent of the participating clients
users have a single, unique presence in the virtual world
the virtual world contains persistent objects
the virtual world may be partitioned
presence, state and simulation occur on authoritative hosts

Foundational components of the Open Grid Protocol include the
publication of: 1) the LLSD dynamic structured data system; an abstract
type system for representing application layer objects along with
serialization rules for protocol messages between these objects. 2) OGP
Base, a messaging abstraction to support the unique needs of VW
interactions. 3) Guidelines for using OAuth and PKIX compliant X.509
infrastructure to authenticate protocol endpoints. The Open Grid
Protocol makes use, wherever possible, of existing, established standards.

The OGPX working group is not proposing the standardization of any one
complete proprietary protocol, but to build on existing OGP related
internet drafts:

LLSD Dynamic Structure Data
Open Grid Protocol : Base
Open Grid Protocol : Authentication
An additional deliverable describes the use of how OAuth or PKIX
compliant digital certificates may be used with TLS to provide origin
integrity in inter-host protocol interactions. Another deliverable is
the specification for presence establishment in the virtual world based
on the previous "OGP : Teleport" draft of the second life architecture
working group.