XDI TC Notes
Following are the notes of the unofficial telecon of the XDI TC held on:
Date: Thursday, 8 November 2018 USA
Time: 1:00PM - 2:00PM Pacific Time (20:00-21:00 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
Drummond Reed
Joseph Boyle
Markus Sabadello
REGRETS
NOTES
General Updates
We shared various developments from events that happened in the last few weeks, e.g. the Internet Identity Workshop, W3C TPAC, and others. Drummond noted that, although he was not there, the news was that there was strong support at TPAC for starting a DID (Decentralized Identifier) Working Group. Markus noted that at IIW there was a session on the âSSI Protocol Stackâ, which is the next topic.
XDI in the SSI Protocol Stack
Markus reported that progress is being made on defining an SSI Protocol Stack, where different communities such as Sovrin, uPort, DIF, and others are trying to converge on a common shared model for an SSI architecture:
https://hackmd.io/s/ryOo-7Rn7#
That document includes the following stack diagram.
Markus took us through the diagram and we discussed where XDI would fit at each layer.
Phil brought up the work that Tim Berners-Lee is leading with SOLID. He suggested that there are good reasons for using semantic graphs for agent-to-agent communications, and this is why to look at both RDF and XDI for the payload. But just using XDI (or RDF) as a payload envelope is not adding enough value to make it worthwhile by itself.
Markus pointed out that most developers donât understand (or care) that with JSON-LD signatures (or RDF or XDI signatures), you are signing the underlying graph model, not a particular serialization. So even that feature of using a semantic graph model gets muddled.
Drummond mentioned that he expected the evolution of agent-to-agent communications to follow the same evolutionary path as Darrell O'Donnell explained in his recent blog post https://www.continuumloop.com/protocol-evolution/.
Markus pointed out that, in juxtaposition to having different data models at every layer, with XDI you would have a consistent data model from top to bottom. So thatâs a perspective we can keep in mind as this protocol layer evolves.
NEXT REGULAR CALL
The next call will be next week at the usual time (Thursday 1PM 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