Compromise Conceptualization Towards CD-02

xri message

A number of us attended the Internet Identity Workshop (http://www.socialtext.net/iiw2005) and lots of folks were interested in XRI and working with us to use XRI with their identity solutions/approaches/grassroots efforts. If we're going to catch this wave of interest, we've really got to close on these specs soon.

However, in our recent phone calls, we haven't had much progress in reaching consensus on the different proposals for CD-02. I think this is largely because there's been some divergence in the various parties' conceptual models, resulting in a difference in some base assumptions about concepts like authority, whats being identified by the authority section of an XRI, and the concept of "authoritativeness".

We're actually not far apart in terms of what gets defined on the wire, but we need to close on the conceptual model - once we do that, I think concensus on defining CD-02 will be quick.

I propose in this email some slight tweaks for the conceptual models that have been put forth by Dave McAlpin and Mike Lindelsee/me. My proposals represent slight conceptual changes for everyone - I hope they will be acceptable to the parties involved, and we can move forward.

We (Mike/me) believe that to trust an authority, you are saying that you have a relationship with that authority. In our case, that may mean a contract or other financial arrangement. You can't have that with a document. Therefore, we believe the definition of authority is at least a entity with which you can have some sort of contract - ie an organization. HOWEVER, this is a philosophical discussion I don't think we should get into - I believe that for the purposes of resolution, we should stop talking about "authority" because its more confusing than useful.

PROPOSAL: Define the XRID as the complete expression (where complete means "as much as one wish's to advertise) of one resource's knowledge about the identified resource. Thus, when you resolve and authority segment, the last XRID you get describes the resource identified by the XRI authority segment, and we say nothing more. Note I've specifically not used the term "XRI Authority". This ends up being a recursive definition - the resource providing the XRID describing the resource identified by n authority subsegments is the one identified by n-1 authority subsegments. (I'm not sure how elements like "Resolved/Query" or "Expires" fit into this though).

PROPOSAL: Replace the term "XRI Authority Resolution" with the term "XRI Authority Segment Resolution", emphasizing the fact that XRI Authority resolution is not the resolution of an XRI Authority (since the concept of an "XRI Authority" is now more confusing than useful). What we really have is a resource that provides XRI Authority Subsegment Resolution service.

It important for us to be able to say that a particular resource (what we used to call an XRI Authority and what I'll now call "Resource A") is authoritative for identifiers built from the identifier we used to get to Resource A. That is, if Resource A is identified as xri://@foo*bar, then I'd like to be able to talk about the fact thta xri://@foo*bar is "authoritative" for xri://@foo*bar*baz and xri://@foo*bar/baz, etc But if we accept the assertion that the XRID is the final expression of authority for a resource, then what does it mean to have an X2R service described in the XRID? For example, is the X2R service authoritative or the XRID? (in other words, is the provider of the X2R service "authoritative" for the path part of the XRI or is the XRID-described resource authoritative for the path part)?

PROPOSAL: The conceptual answer is that the resource described by the XRID is authoritative (and the XRID is the expression of this authority) BUT ALSO that the authority can delegate authority to other services (even to other resources identified by synonym XRIs).

I'm still concerned that we have a lot of conceptual groundwork to do to describe XRI Resolution. I'm hoping that at least we can agree on a conceptual model among ourselves thats relatively simple for *us*, however.

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gwachob@visa.com
Chief Systems Architect
Innovation Group
Visa International
Phone: +1.650.432.3696 Fax: +1.650.554.6817