Minutes: XDI TC Telecon Thursday 8-9AM PT 2008-02-14

["Drummond Reed" <drummond.reed@cordance.net>]

Following are the minutes of the unofficial telecon of the XDI TC at:

Date:  Thursday, 14 Febrary 2008 USA
Time:  8:00AM - 9:00PM Pacific Time

Event Description:
Weekly unofficial call of the XDI Technical Committee.

ATTENDING

John Bradley 
Giovanni Bartolomeo 
Markus Sabadello
Drummond Reed 
Bill Barnhill 
Victor Grey


AGENDA

1) OASIS SYMPOSIUM AND ORMS TC

Drummond reminded everyone of the upcoming OASIS Symposium April 28-30 in
Santa Clara. It turns out that this year there is no provision for TC
meetings to be held at the OASIS Symposium April 28-30 in Santa Clara.
Separate meeting spaces must be arranged. In addition, the new Open
Reputation Management System (ORMS) TC is scheduled to meet Thur/Fri May
1-2.

We agreed this would make it difficult for us to try have a XDI F2F there,
though we may try to arrange at least a dinner. We will explore another
opportunity (such as the May Internet Identity Workshop) to plan a F2F.
Also, the XRI TC has similar needs, and there are key issues the two TCs
need to discuss, such as XRI 3.0 and co-management of the $ space, so we
need to take this into account as well.


2) CALL TIMING FOR ASIA PARTICIPANTS

Drummond has exchanged email with Nat Sakimura about call timing. Nat and
one of his team would like to be able to join the telecons. We discussed
three options:

* Finding a fixed time that works for everyone (may not be possible).
* Having separate calls (leads to disjoint communications).
* Dividing work into subcommittees (which may be a good idea anyway).

# DRUMMOND to further explore options with Nat.


3) XDI ENDPOINTS AND XDI MESSENGER DEMO APPLICATION

Markus uploaded a set of documents this week regarding XDI Endpoints:

	http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/xdi/200802/msg00009.html 

It includes detailed proposals and examples of how to document behavior at
XDI endpoints. Markus walked us through this and demonstrate how this
works using his public XDI Messenger test application at:

	http://graceland.parityinc.net/xdi-messenger/XDIMessenger

* Markus distinguishes between "native" and "non-native" XDI endpoints. The
former support the XDI RDF graph natively; the latter map the XDI RDF graph
to other forms of data repositories (LDAP directories, SQL databases, XML
files, text files, etc.)

* Markus says that non-native XDI endpoints in particular could use an
mechanism for describing the XDI operations they support, i.e., a "WSDL for
XDI".

* Bill asked if there was a SOAP binding. Markus said his implementation is
current POX (Plain Old XML) over HTTP(S). Bill has done something similar
with WS-Resource transfer, but sees the simplicity in a POX approach.

* Bill asked about asynchronous requests and explained the evolution of SOAP
from SOAP-RPC to SOAP-DOC. Giovanni suggested we should develop a mechanism
for XDI workflows that can orchestrate multiple XDI messages needed to
accomplish a specific task or set of tasks. Bill equate this "choreography"
of XDI to to BPEL (Business Process Execution Language). There was consensus
this would be very useful.

* There was a long discussion about RESTfulness of the approach that Markus
illustrated, i.e., of the ability to perform multiple XDI operations on the
graph in one HTTP POST message. Drummond pointed out that XDI operations are
"pure REST" from the standpoint of its three basic rules: 1) everything is a
resource, 2) all resources are URI-addressable, and 3) all resources support
the same base interface. It was agreed that more discussion and
documentation of how XDI implements REST architecture is necessary.


4) GIOVANNI BARTOLOMEO COMMENTS ON VERSIONING

Giovanni posted the following comments on the versioning examples in the XDI
RDF V8 document:

	
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/27179/Draft-Contrib-OASIS-
XDI-versioning.pdf

Giovanni explain that his suggestions are:

* Use of $num instead of ! to delegate to the numeric space.
* Use $ values for the integer numbers of versions

He explained that one benefit is that you can use comparison operators
against versions.