# fdt: Proposed charter text ## Background The incremental, distributed, and consensus-driven standards development process adopted by the IETF has traditionally relied upon natural language and unstructured diagrams, both during the process, and in the outputs it generates. This can lead to standards documents that contain inconsistencies and ambiguities. Formal description techniques could help to overcome the shortcomings of natural language, allowing for the precise, unambiguous description of protocols. A significant body of academic work exists, and many formal languages and techniques have been defined. However, such techniques see limited and slow adoption within the IETF. Understanding the cultural, social, and technical reasons for the slow adoption of formal description techniques would ultimately allow their use to be encouraged, leading to standards that are more trustworthy and secure. Where formal description techniques do see adoption within the IETF, groups often arrive at similar challenges and problems (e.g., protocol evolution). Beyond encouraging the adoption of FDTs, a strong link should be developed between groups that are using them, and between the IETF and the academic community, to share knowledge and learning. ## Objectives An FDT (formal description techniques) research group would seek to: * survey the existing body of work on formal description techniques and tools for interoperability-centered standards, developing a taxonomy of different techniques and the styles of specification that they can express; * identify areas and groups of the IETF where FDTs have seen adoption, and seek to understand and characterise the impact, benefits, and challenges that result from this adoption, in terms of the process and quality of its outputs; * study the cultural and social aspects of the adoption of FDTs in the IETF, including internationalisation of the standards process; * study the technical aspects of the adoption of FDTs in the IETF, identifying the necessary or desirable tooling integrations, and where necessary, developing and prototyping tooling. This includes tools to validate FDT-based specifications, validate instances against a specification, generate random examples for conformance testing, and to generate candidate specifications from a set of examples; * study the effects of concurrent development/evolution of FDT techniques and the standards using them; * bridge the gap between the academic community that is working of FDTs, and their practical use in the IETF; and * provide a resource that can be used by IETF groups considering use of FDTs, to help facilitate take-up and best practice where appropriate. ## Organisation An FDT research group would have open participation, with the main communication channel being a public mailing list. We would seek to have at least one meeting per year at the IETF, with additional meetings co-located with relevant academic conferences and workshops.