XDI TC Unofficial Telecon Notes: Monday 2015-10-19

["=Drummond Reed" <drummond@respect.network>]

XDI TC Notes

Following are the notes of the unofficial telecon of the XDI TC held on:

Date: Monday, 19 October 2015 USA
Time: 10:00AM - 11:30AM Pacific Time (17:00-18:30 UTC)

The TC operates under a standing rule approved 17 July 2008 under which the TC does not hold regular official meetings and conducts all business by electronic ballot only. Unofficial weekly meetings are held to enable discussion among members but no business is conducted nor actions taken.

ATTENDING

Phil Windley
Peter Davis
Joseph Boyle
Markus Sabadello
Drummond Reed
Les Chasen

REGRETS

Christopher Allen
Lionel Wolberger

Final Review of XDI Core 1.0 Working Draft 05

After working all weekend, the editors uploaded the Working Draft 05 for final review.

https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/document.php?document_id=56723&wg_abbrev=xdi

Note that this is just the XML file, and does not include the stylesheet and external image files. To review an almost-complete version (lacking only the How XDI Builds on RDF section and Appendix A), see this link:

http://xdi.org/xdi-spec-docbook/xdi/xdi-core-1.0/xdi-core-1.0-wd05.xml

We reviewed the final new sections:

1. Introduction section

1. How XDI Builds on RDF

2. Example XDI Graphs

3. The XDI 1.0 Specifications

2. ABNF (headings and annotations)

3. Serialization (introduction and examples)

4. Appendix A: Collected ABNF

As a group we made minor edits to the text and graphic in the Introduction section.

We then reviewed revisions to the ABNF terminology and the removal of the attr-terminal rule.

Finally we discussed Joseph’s new ABNF for the xdi-name rule:

An XDI identifier MUST start with a character with the ID_START property defined by the Unicode Identifier and Pattern Syntax [UAX31]. The characters following the ID_START character MUST have the ID_CONTINUE property or be underscore, hyphen, or period.

There was no objection to this approach to specifying allowable Unicode chars. However it then led to the next topic.

Normalization and Comparison

We had a long discussion about this section (note it is titled “Normalization and Canonicalization” in Working Draft 05).

We agreed to change the name of the section to “Normalization and Comparison”.

The discussion revolved around the difficulty of specifying rules on this topic. It is difficult to both minimize false negatives in matching and minimize the normalization and matching rules that would then be required to be implemented by XDI processors.

We have no magic bullet for this. We can’t solve the problem for encapsulated IRIs.  In the end our key points of agreement were:

1. XDI processors MUST NOT do any normalization or make case-insensitive comparisons of XDI identifiers. They should only perform direct binary comparisons.

2. XDI agents and authoring tools SHOULD assist users with implementing suggested normalization rules before XDI identifiers are introduced into XDI graphs.

3. Encapsulated IRIs have their own normalization rules. So all we can say for encapsulated IRIs is, “Normalize an IRI according to its scheme before encapsulating it into an XDI identifier and introducing it into an XDI graph.”

#ACTION ITEM: JOSEPH to propose new text for this section. DRUMMOND to review this text with Joseph. Once there is consensus, this revised draft will be posted as Working Draft 06 for final review before commencing the vote.

Preparation for Committee Specification Draft Vote

As explained to the XDI Core editors by Chet Ensign last week, once the final Working Draft is ready, we follow the procedure detailed here.

#ACTION ITEM: DRUMMOND and MARKUS to initiate this procedure as soon as Working Draft 06 has been reviewed.

Preparations and Call Schedule for IIW

The next Internet Identity Workshop is October 27-29. OASIS ID-Trust is one of the sponsors. We plan to hold at least one session on XDI Core 1.0 there.

NEXT REGULAR CALL

WE ARE NOT PLANNING A CALL NEXT MONDAY, OCTOBER 26, DUE TO IIW.

The next call will be the following week at the usual time (Monday 10AM PT). The link to where agenda items can be posted for the next meeting is: https://docs.google.com/document/d/19oDl0lbb56Grehx2a5flZnhrgnua5l8cVvC_dJ8fTXk/edit?usp=sharing