As the Chair of the Authoring Group for the Information & Content
Echange (ICE) standard, I am pleased to find out about this list, as
the subject is, to say the least, something that the ICE AG is very
interested in. I haven't seen much discussion of ICE in the archive,
so I'd like to introduce ICE to the group.

To explain a little of the history of ICE, version 1.0 of the
standard
was submitted to the W3C (and is at http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-ice) in
October, 1998, with implementations available shortly thereafter. We
released version 1.0.1 at the end of 1999 based on feedback from the
various implementors, where there were additional examples and
clarifications, but no protocol changes. Version 1.1 of the protocol
is about to be released; driven by experience in the field, we've
focused on simplifying and generalizing some of the mechanisms in
ICE,
and in making it cleanly extensible at every level.

From browsing the archives, there appear to be two standards being
discussed that appear to be somewhat analogous to aspects of ICE. I'd
like to introduce those elements to you in case you would like to
compare them; I believe that there are some points at which the ICE
standard and those two standards could possible coordinate, since we
all clearly benefit from working together.

1) OCS and ICE's "catalog". ICE has the concept of requesting a
catalog from a syndicator. The catalog contains offers for
syndication
of content. The catalog appears to be fairly similar to the OCS
catalog, though with considerably more (optional) detail around
scheduling and negotiation, and the ability to customize catalogs
based on the subscriber's identity. On the flip side, OCS is intended
to be a front-end to many kinds of information distribution (AvantGo
channels, RSS, etc.) while (currently) ICE catalogs offer only ICE
subscriptions.

2) RSS and ICE's "update". Once a subscription is established,
delivery is through "updates" transmitted from the syndicator to the
subscriber. I have posted an "expression of RSS in ICE" at
http://www.io.com/~laird/rss-in-ice.html; I am discussing this with
Dave Winer (one of the authors of RSS), and am actively pursuing the
idea that by reconciling the two open standards for content
syndication we all benefit. As I outlined in the document, it would
require some modifications of ICE to act like RSS, but those changes
are beneficial to many other forms of syndiation, not just in being
like RSS, so I think that it would make sense to make those changes
to
ICE.