Following are the minutes of the unofficial telecon of the XDI TC at:
Date: Friday, 18 January 2013 USA
Time: 9:00AM - 10:30AM Pacific Time (16:00-17:30 UTC)
ATTENDING
Drummond Reed
Les Chasen
Markus Sabadello
Joseph Boyle
GUESTS
Animesh Chowdhury
REGRETS
Bill Barnhill
Phil Windley
***** NEWS & UPDATES *****
--- XDI DEMO SERVER
Markus explained that he disabled the Rackspace XDI demo server as the alloted budget period had ended at the end of 2012. He saved an image in case it is ever needed again.
We agreed that at this point it would be easiest for the TC to just point to example XDI server implementations.
# MARKUS to update the page on the TC wiki.
--- INFORMATIONAL PAGE ON XDI BASIC GRAPH CONTENTS
Markus posted his recommendations for the "bootstrap statements" to include in a newly provisioned XDI graph:
He walked us through each of the statements that he recommends for initializing a graph, in this case for an individual.
He emphasized that none of this is normative.
--- INFORMATIONAL PAGE ON UNHOSTED XDI
Markus posted the case for Unhosted XDI applications:
The idea behind Unhosted apps is that they can run entirely in a web browser with no back-end other than the data source(s) that they are talking to. They consist entirely of HTML and CSS and _javascript_. There is no back-end to which the app is "bound".
The Unhosted community also has the idea of "personal servers" that can store data from Unhosted apps for an individual.
Markus's writeup essentially proposes how the Unhosted model can be applied to XDI. An XDI Unhosted app could talk to any number of XDI endpoints.
Markus noted that for XDI servers to support Unhosted apps, they need to support the Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) HTTP header. See http://enable-cors.org/.
Markus also proposes an xdi.js library that would make it easier for developers to create Unhosted XDI apps.
The original inspiration for this approach was the idea that this would be a good approach for building an XDI dictionary editor.
Markus suggested that the SimpleHTTPTransport proposal be augmented with the CORS header. He plans to post a proposal for that.
Les asked if xdi.js would be an example of an XDI accessor - a domain-specific language that makes it easier for a developer to access XDI data.
Animesh talked about his work to describe XDI policies in a domain-specific language (DSL). Markus explained that xdi.js is not an accessor, but an XDI client library, because it provides language-specific access to XDI data, but it was not domain specific.
We discussed how generic a DSL for XDI could become. Animesh said the DSL he is working on is for personal clouds, so it is already works in a particular domain.
--- UPDATED XDI GRAPH PATTERNS AND GRAPH STATEMENTS DOCUMENTS
Markus posted updated versions of both documents:
# MARKUS to update the references XdiGraphModel page on the wiki (DONE).
# DRUMMOND to complete and upload a new version of the XDI Graph Model document.
***** DECISION POINTS FOR THIS CALL *****
--- ADDRESSING INNER ROOTS
Per the discussion on last week's telecon, Drummond posted a proposal for a one-line change to the XDI ABNF to enable addressing of inner roots:
We ran through the use cases, which were much easier to visualize with the visual graph notation.
We will postpone putting this into Last Call until everyone on the list can review it.
--- EQUIVALENCE LINKS AND REFERENCE LINKS (DRUMMOND & MARKUS)
This is still on the queue as Bill wanted to consider breaking it into multiple proposals.
Drummond also replied to Giovanni's message about this paper:
See Drummond's reply at:
Drummond explained that he supports adding $words representing the Similarity Ontology to the $dictionary. However this doesn't change the need for canonical references in XDI, and that is the purpose of the $ref predicate.
Markus explained that he has added examples of equivalence and reference to the XDI2 Local Messenger examples page:
--- XDI POLICY _expression_ (DRUMMOND & MARKUS)
A formal proposal has been posted for declarative policy expressions (vs. the former proposal to use _javascript_ expressions):
We did not have time to discuss this on this call but it is a priority for the next call.
***** DECISION POINT QUEUE REVIEW *****
The decision queue stack is now shown on the following three auto-generated Category pages:
See also this list of proposals that need to be developed:
We added the following proposals to the queue:
***** NEXT CALL *****
The next call is next week at the regular time.