Minutes: XDI TC Telecon Thursday 1-2PM PT 2010-08-05

[Drummond Reed <drummond.reed@xdi.org>]

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

Date:  Thursday, 05 August 2010 USA
Time:  1:00PM - 2:00PM Pacific Time (21:00-22:00 UTC)

ATTENDING

Giovanni Bartolomeo 
Joseph Boyle 
Drummond Reed 
Kaliya Hamlin 


REGRETS
Bill Barnhill
Markus Sabadello 


NOTE: THE IDEARPAD LINK FOR TODAY IS:

      http://xdi.idearpad.org/7

The password is:

      turtle

Please try to preface each of your comments with your name so the transcription into the minutes is easier.
(Note: the link to last week is http://xdi.idearpad.org/6 - password was "turtle".)


1) XDI RETREAT AT WHISTER B.C. AUG 12-16
 * Giovanni votes for European XDI Retreat soon
 * We discussed the general schedule and it looks like most folks can arrive on Thursday the 12th and leave Tuesday morning the 17th, which will give us four days.
 * This means we can have fun in addition to work.


2) TOPIC PRIORITY PLANNING FOR XDI RETREAT

Although this  was also the lead topic last week, we still need to finish the  discussion to determine and prioritize the topic list for the XDI  Retreat at Whistler, B.C. Aug 12-16. Notes from last week included:

2 tracks for retreat: technical and  business focused

Technical Topics for the retreat:
- JSON format (including datatypes)
    -  Decide whether or not to have typed literals, if yes what are the types and what implications does that have on XDI messaging and serialization formats
    -  Decide on definitive X3J format, decide what formats should be mandatory, supported, recommended etc.
- Is XDI a network protocol and how do we separate it  from language definition
- XDI Messaging: async vs sync, push vs pull, pub  sub?
- Link contracts
    -  Very important: Decide on format and processing rules for link contracts, authentication methods and link contract signatures

Business Topics for the retreat:
- Applying  Social Networking
- VRM
- Branding and adoption-driving
- Product and  user-experience
- Integration with a PDX trust framework 


3)  XDI JSON SCHEMA

This topic was also discussed last week. The goal is to frame a precise  list of the remaining open issues so that they can be discussed in  detail and hopefully decided at the XDI Retreat (if Bill or others are  not able to make it, hopefully they will be able to join by telecon).

Joseph summarized the discussion from last week and asked where we might get more input about this.

Drummond said that he was not qualified to provide input on this. But we agreed that it would be ideal to talk to some deep JSON experts to see what they are thinking.

Drummond talked with Markus about this earlier this week and he was in favor of keeping it simple and, when needed, putting the type information inline in the same XDI document.

Joseph made the following suggestion: let's create a wiki page with 3-5 examples of data expressed as:
1) Plain JSON (not in XDI JSON format)
2) XDI JSON without JSON typing
3) XDI JSON with JSON typing (may require Bill to create this example)

This page is the only example we currently have:
http://wiki.oasis-open.org/xdi/X3Format#X3J.28X3forJSON.29

Joseph pointed out that it is not the current proposal, so that needs to be updated.

# ACTION: JOSEPH will coordinate creation of this page, set up the plain JSON data (1 above), and work with Markus to insert the XDI untyped JSON version (2 above), and when ready, ping Bill to see if he can add the XDI typed JSON version (3 above).


4) HIGGINS AND OSTATUS COMPATABILITY

Drummond pointed to http://wiki.eclipse.org/Higgins_PDS_Access and explained how Higgins is going about interconnecting to a PDS using different protocols and formats in addition to XDI. He was on the Higgins call this morning helping answer questions about that.

We also discussed how the federated social web community is solving a similar set of problems, and Joseph pointed out that they are using the same OStatus suite of protocols (OAuth, Activity Streams, PubSubHubBub, Salmon). Joseph explained that, outside of OAuth, it forms a stack: XML (but considering JSON), Atom, Activity Streams, PubSubHubBub, Salmon (for notification back upstream).

These are currently being implemented by the PDS Project in order to show compatibility between the OStatus suite and XDI. This integration is being done in Java, whereas most other implementations are in PHP.


5) UPDATE ON XDI ADDRESSING SPEC PAGE

Giovanni provided an update on his work on this topic.

In particular he pointed to this current sentence in the wiki page --> (ISSUE: What mention should we make of description logic?.) 

He said that we currently do not distinguish between classes and instances and between classes and properties. He said this is a well-known problem in description logic, and if we use this design, then it means XDI is not decidable.

Giovanni suggests that we probably we have two options: to restrict the range of concepts that we will be dealing with in XDI, or to make a change.

# ACTION: Giovanni will put some annotations in the wiki page explaining the problem so XDI TC members who are not expert in Description Logic can understand it and the implications better.


6) NEXT CALL

We will not hold the call at the regular next week due to many attendees being enroute to the XDI Retreat at Whistler next week during the call time. However we will propose morning call times during the mornings (Pacific Time) of Friday the 13 and Monday the 16th.