Minutes: XDI TC Telecon Thursday 1:00-2:30PM PT 2012-02-09

xdi message

http://xdi.idearpad.org/53

OASIS had concerns that the first proposal for showing interop between XDI clients and servers didn't fit the usual public interop demo scenario that OASIS typically provides partial funding for. Mike offered another option: a combination of interop server hosting and sponsoring a session at European Identity Conference, given that OASIS is going to have a presence at EIC.

We discussed the option of putting it towards an "XDI Workshop" or "XDI Bar Camp" that would be both an "Introduction to XDI" marketing event and a working meeting of the TC. Mike suggested we look at the following opttions.

IIW, May 1-3. Markus, Bill, Drummond, Mike, Joseph thought they might be able to attend.

Cloud Identity Summit, July 16-20: Bill, Mike, Drummond, Joesph, and maybe Markus might be able to attend.

It was concluded to run this option by Dee Schur and see what she thinks.

Mike gave an update on the OpenXDI project. They are focused now on building an example application. A key issue is knowing which link contract to use. Another key implementation issue is storage of binary data. The current focus is to finish the demo, then look at the next revision.

Markus provided an update on Project Danube. He has started a new implementation with a fresh code base, which right now contains the basic graph model, JSON serialization format, and Berkeley DB for persistence.

Drummond gave a high-level summary of the progress he has been making with the Respect Network initiative.

Mike said there are two SXSW events on Saturday 3/10 at his office: Personal Data Lightning Round, 1-3pm and Identity Biergarten 6-8pm. Also the SXSW SSO meetup event is on Tuesday 3/13.

Mike said that as the OpenXDI Project has been implementing their current school-related application, it has been difficult for the client to keep track of the link contracts that it can operate under. Mike proposed that clients be able to leave out the link contract reference in the XDI message.

Drummond was very worried about this. He and Bill both suggested that it is necessary for the client to know the identity/relationship in which it is requesting XDI access, so all it is doing is just "shifting the pain" to the server.

We discussed several solutions, including an aggregate link contract and the use of wildcards in the link contract reference. It was agreed we would look first at the proposed new patterns and then revisit this.

This past week Drummond posted updated versions of all 3 core XDI documents:

The most significant update is the "literal contexts" proposal, in which all RDF literals are modeled with an XDI literal context. As explained in Drummond's message:

This gives every literal in the XDI graph its own XDI address without using a cross-reference - simplifying navigation and XRI processing time.

This makes it much cleaner to express and navigate XDI metadata, such as datestamps and versioning.

This simplifies parsing and serialization, since all semantics describing a literal will be in the XDI subject identifying it, and every XDI literal (now called a "terminal") will have an XDI predicate consisting only of "!".

# DRUMMOND to research whether any other XRI delimiter could be used for a literal.

We also talked about the ordinal pattern for explicitly stating ordering. Bill pointed out that this pattern would also support $next as a different option for traversing ordered lists. Giovanni suggested a LISP-like approach using $source and $rest.

The revised XDI docs also show nested root contexts. As explained in Drummond's message:

This provides a clean way to model the relationship of different local XDI graphs available at different XDI network endpoints for the purposes of XDI discovery.

This shows how a single physical XDI server (such as an LDAP server, SQL database, NOSQL database, etc.) can implement a "multi-tenant" model where it can host multiple independent local XDI graphs yet still have them logically appear as part of the global XDI graph.