Draft proposal: 

The OGSA working group has identified a need for an interface for 
reading a stream of bytes.  This would be used in many places, including 
reading from a binary file, reading the results of certain DAIS queries, 
and reading data from a sensor, among other scenarios.  We envisage that 
such an interface would be very simple.  We hope that a specification 
can be agreed quickly and adopted by many Grid projects.  

To this end we are calling a BOF at GGF13 to discuss ways to write a 
specification.  One possibility is for an existing working group to take 
on the work; another is to create a new, short-lived, working group to 
write the specification.  We will circulate a draft charter before the 
BOF.  We already have a sample interface that could form a starting 
point for discussion. 

The proposed interface will be a web service interface, not a client 
API.  It should be possible to map methods in client APIs to operations 
in the interface, but some concepts in the client API may be transformed 
into underlying Grid concepts as part of this mapping.  For example, the 
interface would probably not have an "open" operation, as in the Grid 
this functionality will be part of the name resolution services. 

The intention is that the interface will form part of OGSA.  Therefore 
the authors of the specification should liaise closely with the OGSA WG.