ScutterUserAgent

From FOAF

A suggestion for authenticating scutters: As the owner of my FOAF file, I would like to be in control, which Scutter is visiting my FOAF. Here is a suggestion to implement it:

Some HTTP bots already have links in the HTTP "user agent" back to the originator site, for example "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)"

Let's assume a scutter with HTTP Remote Host "crawler12.scuttersite.org" The HTTP User Agent of the scutter should be: "ScutterBot 0.1 (+http://scuttersite.org/scutterplan.rdf)"

scutterplan.rdf contains something like:

 * <remoteHostPattern>crawler*.scuttersite.org"</remoteHostPattern>
 * <scutterPolicy>"I will not abuse scuttered foaf mail or Chat ID data for sending SPAM"</scutterPolicy>

So now the scuttered site can be sure, that the scutter is a good guy, just by checking scutterplan.rdf and matching against the remote host of the HTTP client. The scuttered site may include http://scuttersite.org/scutterplan.rdf in a white list, similar to robots.txt. scuttersite.org may define a caching policy for scutterplan.rdf, using standard HTTP.

Additional details of the scutter policy could be included. For example: a contact address, where to send future requests for being deleted from the scuttered index.

Limitions of this approach:

 * Every scutter needs a domain or some kind of static IP address.
 * the authentication is not secured against DNS spoofing

TBD: details of the foaf vocabulary.

DeleteMe, if there is an existing spec/vocab for this.

--Rainer Wasserfuhr (wasserfuhr.com)