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Subject: Compromise Conceptualization Towards CD-02
- From: "Wachob, Gabe" <gwachob@visa.com>
- To: <xri@lists.oasis-open.org>
- Date: Sat, 29 Oct 2005 14:50:16 -0700
A number of us
attended the Internet Identity Workshop (http://www.socialtext.net/iiw2005)
and lots of folks were interested in XRI and working with us to use XRI with
their identity solutions/approaches/grassroots efforts. If we're going to catch
this wave of interest, we've really got to close on these specs soon.
However, in our
recent phone calls, we haven't had much progress in reaching consensus on the
different proposals for CD-02. I think this is largely because there's been some
divergence in the various parties' conceptual models, resulting in a difference
in some base assumptions about concepts like authority, whats being identified
by the authority section of an XRI, and the concept of "authoritativeness".
We're actually not
far apart in terms of what gets defined on the wire, but we need to close on the
conceptual model - once we do that, I think concensus on defining CD-02 will be
quick.
I propose in this
email some slight tweaks for the conceptual models that have been put forth by
Dave McAlpin and Mike Lindelsee/me. My proposals represent slight
conceptual changes for everyone - I hope they will be acceptable to the parties
involved, and we can move forward.
WHAT IS AN
AUTHORITY?
We (Mike/me) believe
that to trust an authority, you are saying that you have a relationship with
that authority. In our case, that may mean a contract or other financial
arrangement. You can't have that with a document. Therefore, we believe the
definition of authority is at least a entity with which you can have some sort
of contract - ie an organization. HOWEVER, this is a philosophical discussion I
don't think we should get into - I believe that for the purposes of resolution,
we should stop talking about "authority" because its more confusing than useful.
PROPOSAL: Restrict
our use of the word "authority" to the thing meant in RFC 3896 - the syntactic
construct after // and before the first /..
PROPOSAL: Define the XRID as the complete
expression (where complete means "as much as one wish's to
advertise) of one resource's knowledge about the identified
resource. Thus, when you resolve and authority segment, the last XRID you get
describes the resource identified by the XRI authority segment, and we say
nothing more. Note I've specifically not used the term "XRI Authority". This
ends up being a recursive definition - the resource providing the XRID
describing the resource identified by n authority subsegments is the one
identified by n-1 authority subsegments. (I'm not sure how elements
like "Resolved/Query" or "Expires" fit into this though).
PROPOSAL: Replace
the term "XRI Authority Resolution" with the term "XRI Authority Segment
Resolution", emphasizing the fact that XRI Authority resolution is not the
resolution of an XRI Authority (since the concept of an "XRI Authority" is now
more confusing than useful). What we really have is a resource that provides XRI
Authority Subsegment Resolution service.
WHAT DOES IT MEAN
FOR A RESOURCE TO BE "AUTHORITATIVE"
It important for us
to be able to say that a particular resource (what we used to call an XRI
Authority and what I'll now call "Resource A") is authoritative for
identifiers built from the identifier we used to get to Resource A. That is, if
Resource A is identified as xri://@foo*bar, then I'd like to be able to talk
about the fact thta xri://@foo*bar is "authoritative" for xri://@foo*bar*baz and
xri://@foo*bar/baz, etc But if we accept the assertion that the XRID is the
final expression of authority for a resource, then what does it mean to have an
X2R service described in the XRID? For example, is the X2R service authoritative
or the XRID? (in other words, is the provider of the X2R service
"authoritative" for the path part of the XRI or is the XRID-described resource
authoritative for the path part)?
PROPOSAL: The
conceptual answer is that the resource described by the XRID is authoritative
(and the XRID is the expression of this authority) BUT ALSO that the authority
can delegate authority to other services (even to other resources identified by
synonym XRIs).
I'm still concerned
that we have a lot of conceptual groundwork to do to describe XRI Resolution.
I'm hoping that at least we can agree on a conceptual model among ourselves
thats relatively simple for *us*, however.
-Gabe
__________________________________________________
gwachob@visa.com
Chief Systems Architect
Innovation Group
Visa International
Phone: +1.650.432.3696 Fax:
+1.650.554.6817
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