XDI TC Agenda

Following is the agenda for the unofficial telecon of the XDI TC at:

Date: Friday, 16 August 2013 USA
Time: 09:00AM - 10:30AM Pacific Time (16:00-17:30 UTC)

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AGENDA

NEWS & UPDATES

TC Membership

Drummond will briefly report.

PRESENTATIONS/DISCUSSIONS

Progress on Working Drafts

Although Markus is not expected to be able to attend, Drummond and Joseph will report on progress on the first two specs. In particular we will review the early outline of the XDI Core 1.0 spec:

https://wiki.oasis-open.org/xdi/CoreSpecOutline

Proposal for XDI Privacy Mechanisms 1.0

After more work on privacy-related aspects of XDI, and greater interest in how Privacy by Design can be implemented with XDI, Drummond proposes that we add another spec to our 1.0 suite: XDI Privacy Mechanisms 1.0 (short name xdi-privmech). Although this could be combined with the XDI Security Mechanisms spec, he will explain why he believes it should stand alone.

Link Contract Initiation Patterns

On last week’s call we had an excellent discussion of the sequence diagrams for initiating XDI link contracts. Subsequent discussion has simplified the flows and helped us narrow the security requirements. We will review these simplified flows and their implications for the XDI Security Mechanisms spec.

See the two attached PNG files.

DECISION POINTS FOR THIS CALL

Proposal for Attributes to Always Use Chevrons

After discussion on last week’s call, Drummond sent a poll to the list about the proposal to improve understandability of XDI syntax by having attributes always use chevrons (as classes, instances, or singletons).

https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/xdi/201308/msg00014.html

The results of the poll were 4 in favor, 1 against, and 2 no preference. It is thus proposed that we move forward with this change.

Proposal to Separate Unassigned Values from Null Values

After the discussion on last week’s call, Joseph proposes that we formally distinguished between an unassigned value and a null value, as he believes these are treated as programmatically distinct in some languages, and thus we need both semantics. The proposal is:

To indicate an unassigned value, an attribute MUST NOT have a value context node.
To indicate a null value, an attribute MUST have a value context node whose value is the JSON null value.

Clarified Proposal: Support All Native JSON Value Types

For the ABNF, Joseph wants to clarify that our serialization formats support all native JSON value types. In addition to strings, numbers, true, false, and null, this includes JSON objects and JSON arrays. The specific clarified proposal is:

A JSON object value MUST be serialized as specified by section 2.2 of RFC 4627. This means it is a valid JSON text beginning with { and ending with }.
A JSON array value MUST be serialized as specified by section 2.3 of RFC 4627. This means it is a valid JSON text beginning with [ and ending with ].

Joseph believes that for our 1.0 spec, these values should be treated as opaque from an XDI standpoint, i.e., we would not specify any rules for parsing or addressing inside these values (even though they are fully structured JSON). However this still gives developers the ability to store and retrieve JSON objects or arrays as XDI values.