Minutes: Special XRI TC Telecon Noon PT Friday 2007-08-24

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

Following are the minutes of the special unofficial XRI TC telecon held at:

Date:  Friday, 24 August 2007 USA
Time:  12:00PM - 1:00PM Pacific Time

TO ACCESS THE AUDIO CONFERENCE:
    Dial In Number: 571-434-5750
    Conference ID: 5474

ATTENDING

Wil Tan
Markus Sabadello 
Les Chasen
Drummond Reed


The subject of the call was the current synonym semantics proposal at:

	http://wiki.oasis-open.org/xri/XriCd02/SynonymSemantics 

Key points from the call:

* We briefly discussed Bill Barnhill's proposal to the list but the
conclusion was that: a) we don't want to change the definitions of LocalID,
CanonicalID, and Ref due both to the installed base and to the fact that
there is (now) relatively strong consensus on the use of these synonym
elements (see below), and b) adding attributes to a single synonym element
does not enable control at the XML schema level of cardinality, which is
important for elements such as CanonicalID (and the proposed UseCID).

* We had a long discussion about the underlying needs for applications to
store a persistent identifier for a resource, touching upon many different
potential scenerios: when they are constrained (by schema or data store) to
having only one, when they can keep alternates, when they need to know
equivalence relationships, etc.

* We also discussed the use cases that require a target resources to merge,
migrate, or simply associate identifiers, such as an individual moving from
one community to another or two businesses merging.

* We established that have consensus about the purpose and uses of Ref. The
only inputs that determined whether a Ref is following or not are the QXRI,
the refs= parameter, and the service endpoint selection parameters. The cid
parameter will NOT affect affecting Ref processing.

* We also have consensus that EquivID should have zero-or-more cardinality,
is used to express equivalence relationships between identifiers, and can be
used in conjunction with the priority attribute to express the priority of
such equivalence assertions.

* Where we do not have consensus yet is if or how an XRD should enable
expression of a "stronger than equivalence" mapping relationship between two
identifiers. Such a relationship might be called "directional",
"precessor/successor", "migration", "replacement", "preference", "redirect",
or many other terms.

* Les proposed that we define a PreferredID element for this purpose with
roughly the following definition: "The purpose of this tag is to express the
preferred identifier for the target resource if that preferred identifier is
not the QXRI or CanonicalID. It is recommended that applications retain this
identifier in their local account for future reference to this resource."

* Drummond proposed that the core underlying motivation is to support the
need of XRD authors to inform consuming applications that they should
associate two primary global foreign keys for a resource.

* After 2.5 hours of discussion, we agreed that next step is for all TC
members who have specific views on this issue to post their views to the
SynonymSemantics page of the wiki. 

* There will be another followup call on this topic on the same telecon
number at 8AM PT/11AM ET Monday August 27th.

=Drummond