XDI TC Notes Unofficial Telecon Tuesday 2017-03-21

[Markus Sabadello <markus.sabadello@xdi.org>]

XDI TC Notes

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

Date: Tuesday, 21 March 2017 USA
Time: 9:00AM - 10:00AM 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
Drummond Reed
Phil Windley

NOTES

XDI and Blockchain

Drummond suggested we talk about the role of XDI in an increasingly active ecosystem of blockchain identity.

We discussed a number of areas where "XDI" and "blockchain" (or distributed ledger technology, DLT) can meet:

1. XDI can use Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) as its persistent identifiers.

2. Proofs of XDI link contracts and XDI transactions can be recorded (notarized) on a DLT.

3. Using XDI connectors, all data in a DLT can be made addressable. E.g. an XDI endpoint could have a link contract policy that only evaluates to true if a certain piece of information is present on the DLT.

4. Especially in public DLT systems, there is an increasing demand for solutions to data type and schema interoperability. XDI dictionaries can provide the functionality that is required for many diverse parties to be semantically interoperable.

The last item in the list—interoperable schemas—is directly related to the topics we discussed on the last two calls related to queries (e.g. patient/doctor use case). Advanced queries (e.g. “is Alice >21y?”) require flexible semantics that can be mapped across many different domains. This ability to reuse and contextually specialize standard terms is ideally suited for XDI dictionaries in a way that is not easily suited to RDF/OWL ontologies.

Markus reported that Danube Tech is working on various projects involving XDI and blockchain technology, e.g. the CULedger initiative by U.S. credit unions, and a Personal Data Store project by Helsinki University.

Phil made the following observation: “XDI is more complex that the other alternatives, so adopters will have to be convinced that it is the simplest thing that could possible work.” Drummond very much agreed with this quote, noting that the switch to semantic graphs is a big one (just as the switch to object-oriented programming was once a big one). As Phil put it, “When something is more complex than just JSON, developers must decide that it’s worth the extra pain.” The situation right now is that developers do not see the pain relief that XDI provides because they can’t immediately start using XDI libraries to solve that pain.

However when it comes to the large-scale data interoperability and trust infrastructure problems that distributed ledger technology introduces, we may finally this to be to an area where XDI does become “the simplest thing that could possibly work”—and the best way to actually solve developer’s pain. A specific example is interoperable signing of arbitrary graphs. XDI is an elegant solution for that, but the pain of that problem will likely need to become pretty severe before a semantic graph solution is embraced.

NEXT REGULAR CALL

The next call will be the following week at the usual time (Tuesday 9AM PT). The link where agenda items can be posted for the next meeting is: https://docs.google.com/document/d/19oDl0lbb56Grehx2a5flZnhrgnua5l8cVvC_dJ8fTXk/edit?usp=sharing