Minutes: XRI TC Telecon Thursday 8-9AN PT 2008-10-09

Following are the minutes of the unofficial telecon of the XRI TC at:

Date: Thursday, 09 October 2008 USA

Time: 8:00AM - 9:00AM Pacific Time

TO ACCESS THE AUDIO CONFERENCE:

Dial In Number: 571-434-5750

Conference ID: 5474

ATTENDING

John Bradley

Nick Nicholas

Les Chasen

Nat Sakimura

Markus Sabadello

Drummond Reed

Nika Jones

REGRETS

Marty Schleiff

1) UPDATE ON MEETING WITH W3C TAG CO-CHAIR & NEXT STEPS

John and Drummond briefed the TC on their meeting with W3C TAG co-chair

Stuart Williams last week while in London for the OASIS Open Standards

Forum.

A good deal of the conversation was about abstractness and the relationship between "information resources" (those that are accessible on the net) and "non-information resources" (anything else). As Stuart put it, XRIs are identifiers for the "Platonic ideal", which are always non-information resources. There is even a "Platonic ideal" for information resources (e.g., Web pages), which is the abstract identity of the page independent of any particular content on that page or media type for the page.

In the Semantic Web, adding a fragment to a URI makes the resource identified abstract because it cannot be directly retrieved over the net (although if the fragment actually refers to a part of the document, it is still an information resource). Stuart explained that this is the "httpRange-14 issue" (http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/issues.html#httpRange-14) which has received a tremendous amount of discussion in the TAG.

Stuart explained that treating XRIs as relative URIs has been greeted generally favorably by the TAG. The next step is to write this up and present it on the W3C TAG mailing list.

We agreed to the following steps:

a) First, post a wiki page with an outline of the general XRIs-as-relative-URIs direction.

b) Obtain feedback from XRI TC members about that page.

c) Post messages referring to that page to the W3C TAG public mailing list as suggested by Stuart.

# JOHN, DRUMMOND, LES to post the first draft wiki page.

2) XRDS DISCOVERY UPDATE

Eran Hammer-Lahav was not able to attend the call. Drummond and John summarized their discussion with Stuart Williams that the AWWW problem with XRI Resolution 2.0 is only with section 6, where a media type is used to request a descriptor from the same URI as used to request a representation. This is not a problem for XRIs, since they are abstract identifiers for which there is a defined algorithm for obtaining the http(s): URI for a descriptor. But it is a problem for http(s): URIs. This is the key issue we need to fix in the next rev of the specs.

# DRUMMOND to contact Eran about this issue.

John pointed out that we may still want to revise our usage of some HXRI parameters, such as a media type, just to make it less confusing.

3) F2F MEETING PLANNING

Our next face-to-face is planned for Wed/Thur/Fri Nov. 12/13/14 (starting

after Internet Identity Workshop ends on Wed and closing early afternoon on

Friday) at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. Because we now have a provisional green light for the spec revisions that will be necessary to meet the W3C TAG's objections, we should proceed full speed with the "XRI NG" specs, both for XRI Syntax and XRDS/Resolution. It is proposed that this be the main focus of the F2F, and that we have as much hands-on working sessions as possible.

Drummond committed to working with the XDI TC members to post the XDI TC case for global cross-references in XRI 3.0 syntax by week after next. We will also need to update our proposed XRI forms and transformations ladder.

4) NEXT MEETINGS

Our telecon next week will be devoted to review of the conversation about the XRIs-as-relative-URIs proposal. The following week we'll go over the XRI global cross-reference argument and other issues for XRI NG.

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