[Appeal] sharing, tenor, content manager

[Jan Muehlig]

sharing
This is an attempt to map sharing with a tenor and a content manager. 
Probably, some of you are much further in thinking this through.


As the local hard disk is a concept that is becoming more and more
confuse and obsolete, and computers "normally" being connected in some
way, accessing objects anywhere is just normal. Hence the "where is my
file on the hard disk" is becoming less important (as long as you can 
find it at any time). However, there may be psychological reasons, users 
want to be assured that their file is somewhere safe. So we surely need 
some substitute for that, until the users have trust in not losing objects.

If the boundaries between local devices and network ressource become
fuzzy, the "owner" of the objects must somehow be able to control who
can access them. Most current systems can control access, although with
little granuarity.

So far, there is nothing special here. But if Tenor collects (meta-)data
about objects, the question arises: how much of the meta data about
objects do I want to share? If I share (or send via Email) an image to
person X, I may not want to know her the website from which I downloaded
it, or the Camera I used to take it. Perhaps lot's of metainformation
makes only sense in my local context (if object referers are not global) 
and get meaningless when shared. But still there is a lot that makes 
sense, and which I do not want to share.

The challenge then is to find an intuitive, flexible and reliable way to
define what the others "see". What pops in mind is a kind of border,
domain border, that let's through only certain things. A kind of
firewall. The Tenor firewall. In its most rigid mode, it razors down
everything except for the things inside the object (file). It is simply 
not transported through the firewall.

But this gets more complicated if I store something on a DVD. In this
case I may fall back to my dvd-firewall-settings, but sometimes I want
to store all meta data, or some of it (backup e.g.). I need some kind of 
config to define what is stored. Of course, it must be intuitive and 
reliable.

I am no expert in security concepts, so I can't go deeper here. But what
is obvious is that we come to a compatibility issue. If I
transport/share my objects together with well defined meta data from one
system to the other (let's say a Tenor enabled system to a Gnome 
system), what happens with the meta data? Standards?

jan



















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