RE: [xdi] abbreviation mechanism for XRI's

Bill,

The labelled cross-reference bit might better be handled by a $ letter added to the XRI Metadata spec, since this doesn't require extending XRI syntax. Perhaps "$." or something like that. So your cross-reference would be…

($./mylabel*(XRI-Authority))

Just an idea (and still I think only useful if there are a lot of repeated authority or type XRIs, but I may not yet fully understand this proposal).

As for your question about xri:(foo*bar)*baz/ equivalent to xri:foo*bar*baz/? Is xri:foo*(bar*baz)/ equivalent to xri:foo*bar*baz/ ? The answer is both cases is no. The easy way to think of it is that from the standpoint of resolution, cross-references are literals. Insert one and the value being resolved changes.

For example, even xri://foo and xri://(foo) are not equivalent. They MAY resolve to the same resource and thus be proved to be equivalent otherwise, but not by XRI equivalence rules alone.

=Drummond

From: Barnhill William [mailto:barnhill_william@bah.com]
Sent: Thursday, June 30, 2005 12:21 PM
To: xdi@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: RE: [xdi] abbreviation mechanism for XRI's

Thanks Dave. I see how we can use xrefs to reference a segment group within the XRI, though that also might be prone to cycles. I don't immediately see how to use xrefs to delineate a segment group within an XRI and preserve the semantic meaning of the XRI. You, Drummond, et al. know XRIs way better than I do, any ideas?

Also, is there a XRI 2.1 or 2.0a rev planned, and is there any possibility of the ref production going from

xref = "(" (XRI-reference / IRI) ")"

xref = "(" (XRI-reference / IRI / "(" (label [":" XRI-Authority ) ")" ) ")"

or perhaps the more easier to read version

xref = "(" (XRI-reference / IRI / lref ) ")"

lref = "(" (label [":" XRI-Authority ) ")"

I would need a yacc run to make sure this parses without ambiguity. If anyone has a yacc or similar xri grammar and wants to try the change I'd appreciate it, as I won't be able to set that up until later this weekend.

Which brings up another XRI question:

is xri:(foo*bar)*baz/ equivalent to xri:foo*bar*baz/ ?

How about xri:foo*(bar*baz)/ equivalent to xri:foo*bar*baz/ ?

This kind of brings to mind the previous discussion on an algebra for XRI/XDI, but that's for another day.

Bill

From: Dave McAlpin [mailto:Dave.McAlpin@epok.net]
Sent: Thu 6/30/2005 1:50 PM
To: Barnhill William; xdi@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: RE: [xdi] abbreviation mechanism for XRI's

I agree with your analysis, i.e. square brackets and braces aren’t available and can’t be used. The only legal characters are in the xri-sub-delims production, and none of those are “balanced”, like parens or brackets. I think your only option is to use some form of cross-reference.

Dave

From: Barnhill William [mailto:barnhill_william@bah.com]
Sent: Thursday, June 30, 2005 10:43 AM
To: xdi@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: FW: [xdi] abbreviation mechanism for XRI's

I did a little digging into the XRI 2.0 and IRI specs.

"[" and "]" Are xri-gen-delims, which does mean they are currently reserved, so this would require an XRI spec mod.

However, XRI makes no use of these chars, they're marked as xri-gen-delims as they are reserved in IRI.

Their use within IRI is for IP literals (ie. for IPv6+). With that in mind "[" are prob out. Perhaps "{" "}", which are not covered under XRI or IRI. Of course then we have the problem of readability between "{}" and "()". Brackets would be ideal, but then XDI addresses would not be XRIs, or XRIs would not be IRIs, neither of which are acceptable I'd think.

Another option, though somewhat ugly is ((label:oneormoresegments)) which also makes the grouping looking like a special kind of cross-reference, which in a very loose sense it would seem to be. The following would reference the labelled segments ((label)). This may be the most workable as ")" is a xri-sub-delim, and it may be in line with our current use of "(", though I'm leary of making "("'s meaning depend on the character that follows it.

Bill Barnhill

Senior Consultant (XML, Emerging Technologies, Web Services, Java)

Booz | Allen | Hamilton

mailto:barnhill_william@bah.com

phone:+1.315.330.7386

From: ad@ootao.com [mailto:ad@ootao.com]
Sent: Thu 6/30/2005 12:00 PM
To: xdi@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [xdi] abbreviation mechanism for XRI's

I like this a lot and will start using it in my documents. However... Is it valid for XRI 2.0? if not I'm not going to include support for it in the actual implementations (for now).

Dave? Drummond?

Andy Dale
ooTao

Phone: 877-213-7935
Fax: 877-213-7935

i-name: =Andy.Dale
http://public.xdi.org/=andy.dale

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"Barnhill William" <barnhill_william@bah.com>

06/30/2005 06:32 AM

To	<xdi@lists.oasis-open.org>
cc
Subject	RE: [xdi] Dollar word proposed for data types-$type

Ah, ok. I thought it was $l-en. If we used hierarchy for the $l system I agree, we should use it for this as well. Also, after thinking about it hierarchy does make sense, though it adds more parens.

What are everyone's thoughts on a possible abbreviation mechanism for XRI's, and on the following ideas for such an mechanism? IMHO some of the XRIs we're using in our examples are very long, and an abbreviation scheme would be nice for five reasons:
(1) Increased human readability (low priority)
(2) Decreased bandwidth (high priority)
(3) Streamlined XRI parsing (if you parse an abbreviated authority once, you can cache it for rest of XRI. Implementers will do caching anyway, but an abbreviation would make recognizing when to pull from cache easier)
(4) If we want people to be able to type XRIs or, more likely, use them as links in a browser, then I seem to remember a 256 character limit in IE, possibly other browsers. That limit may have been removed by now, I'm don't know.
(5) Referencing parts of the XRI in the XRI processing

The scheme I'm thinking of would use some grouping characters not used by XRI spec currently..[], perhaps? These would be used in a manner similar to the way regex groups work. Where you have a repeated XDI addressing path xxx, you'd replace the first instance with [somelabel|xxx] and further instances with [somelabel]. For most cases this would be [1|xxx] and [1]. Another decision would be whether or not to allow nesting.

Bill Barnhill
Senior Consultant (XML, Emerging Technologies, Web Services, Java)
Booz | Allen | Hamilton
mailto:barnhill_william@bah.com
phone:+1.315.330.7386

From: Drummond Reed [mailto:drummond.reed@cordance.net]
Sent: Wed 6/29/2005 11:59 PM
To: Barnhill William
Subject: RE: [xdi] Dollar word proposed for data types-$type

Cool idea. $type is already one of our "default dollar words" by virtue of
being one of the XDI schema elements. And at first blush this seems like a
good use of it. I also like the idea of making the fragment identifiers in
the W3C Schema Datatypes spec the default.

I also suggest we go with true hierarchy, i.e., slash. This is what we did
with $l in the XRI Metadata spec - slash delineates the instances of the
type, whereas * delegates to subtypes. For example with $l, the immediate
children (i.e., if there is no delegated *name after $l) are defined to be
two-letter language tags from (I forget the name of the RFC - see the spec
at
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/11854/xri-metadata-V2.0-cd
-01.pdf). For example:

$l/en for English
$l/fr for French

So with the $type space, we would specify (in the Service Dictionary spec)
that the default child namespace under $type is the set of fragment
identifier in the W3C Schema datatypes spec.

$type/string
$type/float

Then you could extend type definition to any other namespace as follows:

$type*(=foo/mytypes)/custom.type

Sure meets the simplicity test. Thoughts?

=Drummond

-----Original Message-----
From: barnhill_william@bah.com [mailto:barnhill_william@bah.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 29, 2005 7:25 PM
To: xdi@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [xdi] Dollar word proposed for data types-$type

$type-xxx where xxx is the fragment identifier from the W3C schema datatype
or $type-yyy-xxx where yyy is the ident for a type system other than W3C
schema datatypes.

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