RE: [xdi] Minutes: XDI TC Telecon Thursday 1-2PM PT 2008-05-29

Following are the minutes of the unofficial telecon of the XDI TC at:

Date:  Thursday, 29 May 2008 USA
Time:  1:00PM - 2:00PM Pacific Time

ATTENDING

Bill Barnhill 
Drummond Reed
Markus Sabadello


AGENDA

1) OUTREACH FOR OASIS STANDARD VOTE ON XRI 2.0 SPECIFICATIONS

We noted that attendance was light because many TC members are helping with
outreach on the XRI 2.0 vote, which lasts through May 31.


2) TREATMENT OF XDI LITERALS

For TC members who could not attend last week, we had another discussion of
about the topic of whether XDI RDF graphs can/should be renderable entirely
as XRIs, and what it means to treat a literal as an XRI.

Bill explained that the motivation for rendering the whole graph, including
literals, as XRIs is that is allows the use of tools and technolgies that
are more problematic if literals are not included. Bill gave the example of
SWIRL (Semantic Web Rules Language) that has problems with literals. 

Bill said, "Literals are the bastard stepchildren of RDF" and said the push
to incorporate them into the graph was similar to the push to do away with
primitives in Java 8. He explained that one approach used in RDF to
accomplish this is to encode literals as URIs using the data: scheme.

Drummond pointed out that in order to distinguish an XDI object which is a
literal-encoded-as-XRI from a XRI object which is an XRI reference to
another XDI resource, the literal-encoded-as-XRI must be fully
self-describing. For example, the string "foo" would have be rendered inside
the XDI type space as something like:

	$a$xsd$string*'foo'

With this approach, transformation between an actual literal and a
literal-encoded-as-XRI would be purely mechanical.

We briefly discussed that this form of encoding could be specified for a
specific XDI serialization format (such as X3 Standard) without affecting
the other formats.



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