Dear RUS members & chairs,

I want to submit the first draft of the interface definition language (IDL) specification of the RUS Core.

This specification is the outcome of the discussions at OGF19 were it was suggested to follow the idea of the ByteIO-WG 

and split the specification into an abstract part and concrete profile renderings.

It is basically based on the current OGSA RUS draft 17, with the addition of the suggestions from OGF20 and group 
discussions. Beyond that I also used the opportunity to add extension points to the current draft, which I would like to

 suggest for discussion.

The following changes have been incorporated:
- listMandatoryElements returns list of QNames instead of empty elements.
- extractUsageRecords (former extractRUSUsageRecords) returns list of plain UsageRecords, the RUSUsageRecord element is 

gone.
- extractRecordHistory added to expose the record history that was exposed via the RUSUsageRecord
- extractUsageRecords can now also return a WS-Enumeration context to allow extraction of larger result sets
- incrementUsageRecordPart and replaceUsageRecords have been removed because they can be expressed with 
modifyUsageRecords
- modifyUsageRecordPart was extended to become modifyUsageRecords to allow general modification of many usage records 
with one request
- deleteSpecificUsageRecords was removed because can be expressed with deleteUsageRecords
- deleteRecords was renamed to deleteUsageRecords

New features:
- All search terms/filters/update expressions were changed to xs:any and now have an URI attribute to allow different 
query dialects to be used. Currently the specification mandates XPath 1.0 for delete and extract and XQuery Update 
Facilities for modify.
- xs:any extension points were added to all operation request and response messages as well as to the record history.
- The type of operation in the record history is now specified using a URI allowing future and implementor 
extensiability.

This document currently is very much a work in progress, some sections are still missing (authors, abstract, 
contributors, appendix amongst others) and the text can need some more work. However I feel that it is time to present 
this to the working group for discussion so that we can come to a consent about the general direction and move on from 
there. 

Besides wanting to encourage people to critically examine the presented document, I want also to especially encourage 
expressions of support!

The document was written using the W3c XMLspec DTD and converted with a stylesheet to xhtml format.

WARNING: GridForge mangles the file a little bit upon download, so either ignore or remove the faulty comment at the end
!