Minutes: XRI TC Telecon 8-9AM PT Thursday 2008-07-10

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

Following are the minutes for the unofficial telecon of the XRI TC at:

Date:  Thursday, 10 July 2008 USA
Time:  8:00AM - 9:00PM Pacific Time

ATTENDING

John Bradley 
Bill Barnhill 
Markus Sabadello
Marty Schleiff 
Drummond Reed
Jeff Hodges 
Nika Jones


AGENDA

1) STANDING RULE BALLOT

TC Administrator Mary McRae has suggested we have a ballot on the following
Standing Rule in order to formalize our informal meeting schedule:

	"Standing Rule: Does the TC wish to adopt a standing rule to conduct
regular business only by electronic ballot, without Meetings, with the
exception of Meetings called for a special purpose with a minimum of 15
calendar days notice?"

# DRUMMOND to post the ballot.


2) W3C TAG TELECON REVIEW

Our primary agenda item was to recap takeaways from last week's telecon and
discuss our ideas for how best to proceed with the TAG.

	http://wiki.oasis-open.org/xri/XriTcW3cTag

Drummond noted that in a post-briefing last week, Paul Trevithick had said
that one area he would like to discuss with the TAG is the need for a
solution to resolvable structured identifiers needed by the Higgins Project
to reference data across contexts. He and others at the Higgins Project are
spearheading an effort to specify a uniform way to do this using either XRIs
or Cool URIs (as used for Linked Data). This effort is called Universal Data
Identifier (UDI):

	http://parity.com/udi

Jeff felt it was mostly an educational telecon, and suggested the next step
should be to ellicit more questions from the TAG so as to continue this
education. Drummond noted the "worldview problem", i.e., that the layer of
abstraction that XRI is designed for is currently very foreign to the TAG's
way of thinking, so it may take much more work than we might have expected
for the TAG to understand it.

John suggested that we ask the TAG go on record answering the question,
"What is the bar for producing a new URI scheme?" They suggest some
requirements in

	http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#URI-scheme and
	http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/URNsAndRegistries-50.xml

which it appears that XRI meets. So making this much clearer would make it
much easier and more objective to apply such a test. Drummond noted that the
latter document is almost two years old and much of what it says about XRI
is outdated.

# DRUMMOND to send note to Stuart about this.

Jeff pointed out that XRI is both a new URI scheme and a new set of
namespaces. All URI schemes establish a new URI space, but many reuse
existing namespaces. One exception is the urn: scheme, because it explicitly
creates new namespaces for persistent identification of resources. The
URNsAndRegistries-50 document leaves it unclear whether the TAG feels that
URNs should no longer be used, as its main focus is on whether new URI
schemes or URN subspaces are needed.

Marty explained that he sent a message last Friday to the TAG's public list
in response to questions from Ray Denenberg of the Library of Congress, but
no response has been posted by anyone. In his message he points out that the
TAG's document on URI Schemes that posits that they are very expensive, but
Marty's experience is that in specific cases, trying to solve the problem
without creating a new URI scheme is even more expensive. Marty believes
that is the case with XRI.

# MARTY to start new threads on the TAG list for continued discussion.
Others are encouraged to chime in as needed.

Bill suggested that discussions with individual TAG members or small groups
may be the most productive. Drummond noted that both Peter and Stuart
Williams, TAG co-chair, have suggested the same thing, and that this will be
pursued as quickly as possible -- the primary barrier at this point being
summer schedules.

# DRUMMOND AND PETER to follow up with Stuart on scheduling.


3) IPR CLARIFICATION

This was scheduled as an agenda item because on last week's TAG telecon, the
TAG said that IPR wasn't necessarily an issue for them, but was for "people
on the net". Also, OASIS voters have suggested that we need to clarify XRI
IPR and the relationship of the XRI TC and XRI registry services such as the
issues raised on the Wikipedia Talk page on XRI.

# PETER to schedule this first on the next agenda.


4) SUMMER CALL SCHEDULE

Drummond explained that he needs to take a six week sabbatical for travel,
summer vacation, and to handle a number of domestic chores. There was a
consensus that we should take a hiatus from telecons at least through the
end of the month. 

# PETER to determine when to restart telecons in August.