Minutes: XDI TC Telecon Thursday 1:00-2:00PM PT 2012-02-16

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

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

Date:  Thursday, 16 February 2012 USA

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

THE IDEARPAD LINK FOR TODAY IS:

     http://xdi.idearpad.org/53

ATTENDING

Mike Schwartz 

Markus Sabadello 

Drummond Reed 

Bill Barnhill 

Giovanni Bartolomeo 

GUESTS

Phil Windley

1) SPECIAL GUEST: PHIL WINDLEY

Phil is co-founder and CTO of Kynetx and author of the new book, The Live Web. He explained his interest in doing an XDI server implementation and using XDI together with KRL (Kynetx Rules Language). Kynetx has been focused on Personal Event Networks, where events can be shared against a set of personal devices and personal data. Being able to connect a collection of personal event networks, and how to do trusted links between them, is a good fit for XDI.

In particular, XDI link contracts are good for describing event channels and the permissions and notifications that go with each channel.

Phil explained that the technology that his company Kynetx brings to the table, KRL, fits well with the kind of rules processing required to efficiently process events. He said that KRL is just one choice of rules language -- the model he is advocating is not specific to any one rules language.

We discussed dynamic channels, which may be put up and torn down very quickly depending on other conditions. This fits well with modeling channels as data structures in the XDI graph. 

What is most compelling about XDI when it comes to event networks, however, is the ability to federated event networks at scale just like SMTP permits federated email messaging at scale. An example is the idea of "intentcasting" in VRM (Vendor Relationship Management), where for instance a parent travelling to Disneyland arrives and finds their stroller has been lost by the airline. Rather than all the work of renting a car, finding a store, and finding a stroller, the parent could just "cast" their intent to buy (or rent) a stroller, and relevant merchants in the area can respond. That requires a federated event network where the event messages have matching semantics so publishers and subscribers can find each other's intents.

It also clearly requires trust and permissions, as Phil pointed out, saying that "All you need to do is tweet '#macbookpro problem' and see all the junk you get back to understand the trust issue."

Drummond also mentioned a conference he had recently been sent an invitation too called SmartData that wants to explore ways of sharing personal data via "autonomous agents" who can protect the privacy of that data.

   http://www.springerlink.com/content/1883257206825632/fulltext.pdf

2) IDTRUST BUDGET PROPOSAL

Update.

3) OPEN SOURCE PROJECT UPDATES

Markus provided an update on XDI² ("XDI-Squared"). This is the new Java code base that he has recently packaged up and published. It is a new effort that is independent of the earlier XDI4j library (a component of the Higgins project). Supported features right now include a basic implementation of the XDI graph model, (de-)serialization, several storage mechanisms, and an XDI client and server. It doesn't yet have link contracts but Markus is going to continue to evolve it as a general purpose reference implementation of the specs. It also includes a set of XDI-related web tools, such as the XDI Converter or XDI Messenger.

6) RESCHEDULING WEEKLY CALL

Bill asked if the TC would consider moving the weekly call to 9AM PT/noon ET on Friday. 

# DRUMMOND to send an email to the list checking with everyone about this. If there is agreement, we will move to that call schedule next week.