Re: [xdi] Minutes: XDI TC Telecon Friday 2013-04-19

Interesting -- I brought up with Markus during our discussion whether we should introduce a high-level entity into the XDI graph model structure purely for modeling references, which inherently do not have semantics, but are just pointers. They could potentially even be defined at the ABNF level to be $ref statements.

* identifiers could be used for this purpose.

But there are two costs to doing this:

More complexity. As I just argued in my message to Les, do we really need "pure references"? Or should we stick to semantic addressing?
Markus did not like breaking the symmetry between mutable * IDs and immutable ! IDs.

Thoughts?

=Drummond

On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 6:02 PM, Joseph Boyle <planetwork@josephboyle.net> wrote:

I think this shows more than ever that we need to accept that references can and should have less detail than definitions, and start distinguishing the two.

On Apr 22, 2013, at 4:07 PM, "Chasen, Les" <les.chasen@neustar.biz> wrote:

Wow … you can't have simple namespace delegation anymore?

From: Drummond Reed <drummond.reed@xdi.org>
Date: Monday, April 22, 2013 5:32 PM
To: Markus Sabadello <markus.sabadello@xdi.org>
Cc: OASIS - XDI TC <xdi@lists.oasis-open.org>, Phil Windley <pjw@kynetx.com>
Subject: Re: [xdi] Minutes: XDI TC Telecon Friday 2013-04-19

- Community names such as =neustar*les don't work anymore, because the instance *les can't follow the singleton =neustar. Do you have any idea on how to solve this?

Markus and I talked about this for nearly an hour. The bottom line is that to be consistent with the full XDI graph model, *names and !numbers need to behave consistently as instances, which means they only follow a class (in square brackets). So it means that community names need to specify the class before the instance, e.g., =neustar[+employee]*les. Or they can use a cross-reference such as =neustar=(les). Or, for a pure name registry, it would be an instance of the mutable ID class, e.g., =neustar[*]*les. (Ugly but semantically consistent.)

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