Proposal for incremental deliverables

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

XDI TC Members and Observers,

On today's TC call we have an agenda item to discuss a proposal for a set of
incremental deliverables. This came out of an XDI retreat that Loren West,
Dave McAlpin, and I took (at Loren's fabulous mountain lake cabin). It's one
key element of our larger action item to revise our TC charter at the same
time we publish our Use Cases and Requirements document.

The thrust of the proposal is that we can best accomplish our goals by
having self-selected teams starting to generate specific incremental
deliverables toward the larger set of TC deliverables that will be in the
revised charter.

Work could proceed quickly because the teams could work in parallel on two
"tracks", each providing feedback off the others work:

1) Envelope Model track

2) Universal Model track

On both tracks, the proposal is that teams produce two incremental
deliverables:

A) A proposed XML schema.

B) A proposed protocol including link contract negotiation.

The idea is that the Envelope model teams would be doing their work based on
a very simple schema designed to encapsulate existing XML documents and
handle very simple protocol exchanges (such as retreiving the XDI metadata
describing an XRI-identified resource). The Universal model team would be
defining the more comprehensive Universal schema and more complex link
contract negotiation and synchronization scenarios.

One key test is that the Universal model (both the schema and protocol)
SHOULD end out being a superset of the Envelop model, i.e., in the end, they
are both describing/manipulating the same XDI graph (although the Envelope
model can provide other XML-facing benefits and the Universal model can
provide other logical abstraction benefits).

So having both teams working the problems independently and comparing notes
should provide both cross-fertilization and cross-checking (makes sense when
everything is built around XRI cross-references, no? ;-)

If we decide to go this direction, Dave has volunteered to head up team 1A,
and Loren team 1B. We'll discuss this approach further and take other
volunteers on the call.

Talk to you shortly,

=Drummond