Minutes: XDI TC Telecon Thursday 1-2PM PT 2008-10-16

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

[Apologies for the late minutes - I have been under a deadline. =Drummond]

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

Date:  Thursday, 16 October 2008 USA
Time:  1:00PM - 2:00PM Pacific Time

ATTENDING

Giovanni Bartolomeo 
Mike Mell
Drummond Reed 
John Bradley


AGENDA

1) $ADD$$

In Higgins-related work, Markus, Drummond, and Paul have repeatedly seen a
pattern where an XDI client needs to request that an XDI server assign an
XRI for a new resource. This is normally a $add operation, but typically
that would produce a simple $true or $false response from the server. In the
same pattern of using a return type modifier, such as $get$a$xsd$boolean to
request a $true/$false answer as to the existence of an XDI resource, Markus
and Drummond propose using the XDI variable $$ modifier with $add,
i.e., $add$$, to request that the server perform the $add operation and then
return the XRI assigned to the resource.

Drummond ran through the use cases for this, and the proposed client and
server behaviour. There was consensus this seemed like a good solution.

# DRUMMOND to contact Markus and ask him about $add$$ examples in the XDI4J
utilities.

UPDATE: In subsequent discussions after the call, it was pointed out that to
be consistent with other operation type modifiers, the syntax should be
$add$a$$.


2) PREPARING THE CASE FOR GLOBAL CROSS-REFERENCES IN XRI 3.0

Drummond explained that with the XRI TC F2F (Nov. 13/14) after Internet
Identity Workshop (Nov. 10-12) rapidly approaching, the XDI TC has an action
item to prepare the case for global cross-references in XRI 3.0. Even the
proposed XDI variable identifier $$ (see above) is an example of this syntax
at work. 

Drummond and Markus explained the fundamental rationale: while XRI 2.0
syntax supports the concept of cross-references, in retrospect the syntax
only supports the expression of a local cross-reference: reuse of an
identifier expressed in a local context, i.e., with the local context
symbols * and !. What we have seen countless examples of in XDI,
particularly since the development of XDI RDF, is the need for global
cross-references: reuse of an absolute XRI in its native global context.

There was consensus that the irony is that since we didn't have a syntax to
express a global cross-reference, we ended out simply "reading" global
cross-reference meaning into the cross-reference syntax that XRI 2.0 did
support. We didn't realize that its interpretation was, syntactically
speaking, limited to a local context.

We agreed that the next steps are to write this up as a wiki page and/or
presentation for the XRI TC.

# DRUMMOND AND MARKUS to prepare this page/presentation.