Re: Agenda: XDI TC Telecon Thursday 1-2:30PM PT 2011-03-24

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

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

Date:  Thursday, 24 March 2011 USA

Time:  1:00PM - 2:30PM Pacific Time (21:00-22:30 UTC)

ATTENDING

Bill Barnhill 

Joseph Boyle

Michael Schwartz

Drummond Reed

Giovanni Bartolomeo

THE IDEARPAD LINK FOR TODAY IS:

     http://xdi.idearpad.org/26

1)  REVISED XDI GRAPH PATTERN DOCUMENT

Drummond upload a new version with two key revisions:

• A new primary/secondary addressing pattern to solve the key issue with the synonym pattern that we discussed last week.

• One key revision to the versioning pattern suggested by Bill.

Drummond explained the primary/secondary address proposal. The main problem it solves is adding directionality and precedence to synonyms. By using relational arcs identified with $ to identify the relation of a secondary address to a primary address, we provide the semantics necessary to resolve the question of where further resolution of the XDI graph should continue after a synonym is encountered. The rule is:

• If a context node has a $ relational arc (and it can have exactly zero or one $ arc), then it is a secondary address, and resolution should continue at the object of that arc, which is a primary address.

• If a context node has one or more $$ relational arcs, they are secondary addresses for the context node, and resolution of the graph should continue from the original primary address.

Bill said we should add a comment about the meaning of the two top graph segments on the "Primary and Secondary Addresses page" that specifies that these segments are  "addresses of the root context of the graph".

# DRUMMOND will make this revision.

We also went over the revision to the versioning pattern. Drummond pointed out that the pattern, which is simply to treat the current version in the version tree as a reference (instead of making a duplicate copy of the data), is the same across all the versioning examples.

Mike asked about and we went over the differences between the simple property graph, the complex property graph, the simple subject graph, and the complex subject graph.

2) IMPLEMENTATION PROJECTS

Mike reported that OpenXDI is proceeding full steam. Gluu has just hired another key programmer to work on the project who will be a dedicated resource. OpenXDI calls will continue to be held on Fridays at 10AM PT.

The goal of OpenXDI is to produce both client code and a server, including a way to quickly set up a cloud server. The project will also support XRI resolution.

The server will be in Java, and the client will use the Python API. Mike would like to build the equivalent of LDAP search.

He has also commissioned a logo for the short name of the project, "OX". 

Bill gave an update that he is finalizing plans on what he will be doing. He has been looking over the Locker Project, Jeremie Miller's new open source effort to build a personal data locker. Currently it has connectors and apps. Apps will be coming from third-party developers. Connectors are ways to be tapping personal data and bringing them into the store. Connectors currently exist for most social networks.

Bill said the Locker Project has its own file system.

Joseph is also playing with the Locker Project code. He and Bill discussed creating an XDI app for Locker that could access and manipulate the Locker data as an XDI graph.

We discussed the philosophy of first pulling everything into JSON and then subsequently worrying about semantics. That may be in fact be nicely complementary to XDI since we are tackling the latter problem.

3) XDI STATEMENTS FOR EACH GRAPH PATTERN EXAMPLE

We need to produce a collection of XDI  statements representing each of the graphs in the XDI Graph Patterns collection. This needs to happen soon so it can be pulled into the XDI Graph Model document.

Drummond asked for volunteers to help him with this. Bill volunteered since he's doing it anyway. Mike volunteered one of the OX developers.

We also discussed whether a flat list of XDI graph statements might not itself be a very simple and efficient XDI serialization format (e.g., in comparision to the JSON format) because it so easy to compress, and it is already "pre-indexed". We agreed to discuss this further after we have produced the XDI statement lists for each of the XDI Graph Pattern examples.

4) XDI MESSAGING PATTERN

We agreed to discuss this pattern next week.

5) NEXT CALL

The next call is next week at the regular time.

------------

ONGOING ISSUES LIST

Each of these is a candidate for the agenda for future calls.

* TRANSACTIONAL INTEGRITY FOR XDI

Since versioning, as one example, involves multiple transactions that must be commited as a group, we will need to address transactional integrity. Specifically, we need to define how this will be handled at the protocol level, vs. the implementation level.

* PROPOSED CONSTRUCTS/OPERATORS FOR XDI

Discuss the following wiki page originally posted by Giovanni:

  http://wiki.oasis-open.org/xdi/XdiNewFoundation

* DICTIONARY STRUCTURE

Mike would like an example of the PDX dictionary as soon as we can do it.

*   EQUIVALENCE SEMANTICS

Close on whether we need an additional $ word that is the equivalent

of Higgins Personal Data Model (PDM)  semantics   of h:correlation,

which is not as strong as $is.

      http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/xdi/201006/msg00036.html

* COOL URIS

Continue previous discussion about the use of standard RDF URIs in XDI:

  http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/xdi/201006/msg00023.html