[xri] Introductions of TC participants

[Drummond Reed <Drummond.Reed@onename.com>]

XRI List Members:

Co-chairs Gabe Wachob and I and some of the other founders of the TC held a
planning session recently and thought it would be a good idea to invite
participants who are so inclined to send a short introductory email to the
list. This is strictly optional, just to help us get to know one another.

I'll start to kick it off. I've been involved in Internet infrastructure
since 1993 (with the launch of a shell/SLIP converter called The Internet
Adapter - anyone remember that?). I founded a company called Intermind Corp.
to commercialize a database linking techology which grew out a previous
startup which did hypertext databases for the retail software industry.

Intermind's software eventually became part of the "push" push, which
suffered the steepest rise and fastest fall of any technology in Internet
history, as you may the remember. What you may not remember is that
Microsoft's answer to push was CDF (Channel Definition Format), the first
commercial application of XML (and the first time MS beat Netscape and
everyone else to propose an open standard to the W3C).

Those of us at Intermind quickly recognized XML as the universal data
interchange format needed to bring database linking technology to the
masses. However our work also led us to realize that database linking on an
Internet scale required more robust addressing capabilities that existing
Internet infrastructure provided. Maintaining application-to-application
links at the data level is much more demanding than maintaining hypertext
links at the page level.

That's how we became focused on creating an XML-based addressing solution
that provided the necessary infrastructure for widespread database linking.
We renamed the company OneName to represent the power of these new
"meta-addresses", and we named the specifications XNS because of the
resemblence to the federated architecture of DNS. (We've since lived to
regret this because there is so much more to it than naming.)

OneName then worked with others in the industry to help found a non-profit,
the XNS Public Trust Organization (XNSORG), that would provide open
community governance of this infrastructure. XNSORG published v1.0 of the
XNS specifications in July and began soliciting feedback about the most
appropriate standards body to which to contribute the work. The consensus
was OASIS and thus was born the XRI TC.

Now I'll play tag team and tag Bill Washburn, the distinguished gentlemen
who currently serves as President and Managing Director of XNSORG and has
volunteered to moderate the TC calls, to provide a little of his background.

I look forward immensely to working with everyone joining the XRI TC to
produce what I firmly believe will become specifications fundamental to the
next layer of Internet infrastructure.

=Drummond