XDI TC Notes

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

Date: Monday, 13 June 2016 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

Markus Sabadello
Les Chasen
Drummond Reed
Phil Windley
Joseph Boyle

Update on Recent Identity Conferences

Since we last met, a number of identity and decentralized data conferences have taken place:

ID2020 (NYC)
Cloud Identity Summit (New Orleans)
Decentralized Web Summit (San Francisco)

Notes about ID2020:

It strongly established the “developing world” use cases of providing self-sovereign identity and decentralized data sharing for refugees, the unbanked, etc.
The was somewhat of a presupposition that “blockchain was the answer”, but at the same time there is a broad consensus that is the case.
Phil felt that it should have been two days, with most of it being unconference. Drummond agreed.

Notes about CIS:

It further reinforced how relevant blockchain is to identity and decentralized data sharing.
Lots of discussion about self-sovereign identity.
Not as much discussion of semantic graphs.

Notes about the Decentralized Web Summit:

It was not widely publicized beforehand.
Recordings:

It covered a wide variety of decentralized technologies, including blockchain, IPFS, Webtorrent.
It had some very prominent speakers, including Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee.
Most relevant to the XDI TC is the “full stack” being developed on top of Linked Data

This starts with the RDF graph model as the base
WebID is the Web identity system
On top of this is Linked Data and the Linked Data Platform—a way to operate on RDF graphs (LDP is what inspired Peter Davis and Hubert Le Van Gong to propose implementing XDI RDF)
Add Web Access Control for permissioning
Add Websockets for persistent real-time connections to your Linked Data graph
Together these technologies comprise SOLID (Social Linked Data)

Markus shared the view that SOLID is slowly developing the same capabilities we have developed for XDI

It is still early and not as sophisticated as XDI
They have basic signatures in JSON-LD
They do not yet have structures like XDI link contracts

JSON-XD

We discussed JSON-XD, a developer-friendly mapping of XDI into JSON inspired by the RDF-based JSON-LD format:

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

Markus has worked on an experimental implementation of JSON-XD:

https://server.xdi2.org/XDIConverter?sample=8

We talked about the actual format options (shown as Option #1 and Option #2 on the JSON-XD wiki page)

Markus prefers option #1
Phil prefers option #2
Les does not have a strong opinion, but believes that we should use the same format as the JSON-LD community unless there is a strong reason to do otherwise

Joseph felt that it would be ideal to establish maximum compatibility with the JSON-LD format.

#ACTION ITEM: MARKUS to update JSON-XD wiki page.

#ACTION ITEM: DRUMMOND to contact Manu Sporny for input about JSON-XD.

NEXT REGULAR CALL

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

xdi message

XDI TC Notes

ATTENDING

Update on Recent Identity Conferences

JSON-XD

NEXT REGULAR CALL