XDI TC Notes

Following are the notes of the unofficial telecon of the XDI TC held on:

Date: Thursday, 13 September 2018 USA
Time: 1:00PM - 2:00PM Pacific Time (20:00-21:00 UTC)

The TC operates under a standing rule approved 17 July 2008 under which the TC does not hold regular official meetings and conducts all business by electronic ballot only. Unofficial weekly meetings are held to enable discussion among members but no business is conducted nor actions taken.

ATTENDING

Drummond Reed
Phil Windley
Markus Sabadello
Joseph Boyle

REGRETS

GUESTS

Doug Migliori

NOTES

EDOM and XDI

Doug Migliori from Control Beam will introduce his work on EDOM, and we will have a dialog on how EDOM might have synergy with our work on XDI.

EDOM stands for "Event-Defined Object Model". Events define and update the state of any object, and such events can be distributed across heterogeneous environments. This can help address challenges of semantic interoperability of message payloads. An adequate, high level of abstraction can solve interoperability across all domains. This however makes it harder to describe the approach.

Ontologies as standardized classifications of domain concepts are becoming more popular.

State in EDOM is represented as attribute values that are a part of the class (or parent classes) of an object. Events EDOM are also described by classes and attributes.

When a system generates an event and transmits it to connected systems, those systems can re-transmit it to more connected systems, and/or generate new events. The complete set of messages triggered by an event is not known in advance.

An initial state can be defined through an initial set of events (similar to a distributed ledger's genesis transactions).

EDOM is being used e.g. by GS1 for product-related events, and also in other groups and consortia.

Events can be correlated across different event stores. No only event headers, but also payloads should be interoperable.

As a data model, RDF feels machine-centric, not human-centric. Grid formats like CSV are based on two-dimensional arrays. The goal is to be compatible with Semantic Web technologies like RDF, but events need to be more granular - they don't just represent current state, but the history of state.

BEAM (Bidirectional Event Attribute Message) is a grid-based format for events and queries in EDOM.

Unlike XDI, EDOM does not know any special keywords such as $ref, etc.

Connections are modeled as reciprocal events. E.g. a friend relation can be modeled as an event.

Decentralized trusted identifier stored on a blockchain should be used as an anchor, which can then be used to root and derive other semantic identifiers. All identifiers for EDOM classes and attributes could be posted to a blockchain.

An object gets initiated through an initial event that defines the owner of the object. Phil asked about how a DID's public key could be used for EDOM identifiers. Doug replied that foundational EDOM identifiers have to be trusted, in order to then create classes and attributes from the initial identifier.

We concluded by discussing the possible synergy with XDI and the OASIS XDI TC, and agreed to continue that discusson as we both move forward.

NEXT REGULAR CALL

There will be a TWO WEEK BREAK due to travels and other events. The next call will be in three weeks at the usual time (Thursday 1PM PT). The link where agenda items can be posted for the next meeting is: https://docs.google.com/document/d/19oDl0lbb56Grehx2a5flZnhrgnua5l8cVvC_dJ8fTXk/edit?usp=sharing