Minutes: XDI TC Telecon Thursday 1-2PM PT 2010-06-03

XDI TC
Informal Telecon Notes - June 3 2010

 

ATTENDING

 

Bill
Barnhill

John
Bradley

Joseph
Boyle 

Giovanni
Bartolomeo 

Joe
Johnston

Drummond
Reed 

Markus
Sabadello 

 

 

(The following notes are an edited version of the IdearPad transcript that Bill Barnhill sent to the list.)

 

1)
INTRODUCTIONS

We
introduced two new TC members: Joseph Boyle (who will go by "Joseph")
and Joe Johnston (who will go by "Joe").

 

 

2) IIW AND
PDX UPDATE

XDI TC
members who attended Internet Identity Workshop two weeks ago gave an update on
the XDI-related activity there, in particular in the increasing interest in PDX
(personal data exchange) using XDI. There was one session held on the XDI graph
model but it was at the very end so a number of people (including Drummond and Joseph)
were not able to attend.

 

 

3) XDI AND
RDF

We
discussed the importance of accurately describing relationship between the two,
especially considering the upcoming W3C Workshop on RDF 2.0: 

 

  http://www.w3.org/2009/12/rdf-ws/

 

Bill
characterized it that XDI was a superset of RDF. Drummond believes that is
accurate, and that a lossless mapping of RDF into XDI and back can be
specified. However the reverse is not true, i.e., there are statements in XDI
that cannot (at present) be mapped into RDF.

 

 

3) PDX
EXAMPLE DOCUMENT

Due to the
limited time on the call, we did not go through the example PDX document posted
on the TC wiki:

 

  http://wiki.oasis-open.org/xdi/PdxExample

  

However Giovanni
said that it would be a high priority to go through this document and discuss
the patterns and issues. He listed the following issues as a starting point
(while pointing out there are more):

 

-$is

-relationship
btw PDX and FOAF

-associativity

-"complex
predicate"

-usage of
"relative" ref e.g. (/+postal+address)

-"how
much" goes in the subject and "how much" in the predicate...

-$ as a
suffix

 

We agreed
to commence this discussion in email on an issue-by-issue basis to advance each
question as far as we can before the next call.

 

 

4) OTHER
EXAMPLE PDX SCENARIOS

 

Joe
Johnston would like to see us document other example PDX scenarios involving
different common social networking functions. This would demonstrate the value
of XDI to developers new to XDI concepts by using scenarios that are easy for
them to understand. Examples include:

 

- Social
adddress book

- Photo
sharing

- Friending

- Chatting

- Event
sharing

-
Calendaring

- Wiki

 

Joe also
thought a contrast between FOAF and PDX vocabularies would be useful.

 

Drummond
suggested doing this on the XDI TC wiki.

 

# DRUMMOND
to create a page and send Joe a link

 

 

5) LINK
CONTRACTS

 

Markus
poised the following special questions related to link contracts (but not the
link contract format itself):

 

- If link
contracts are enabled at an XDI endpoint and no link contracts exists, what is
the "default" behavior? Allow nothing? Allow only $get?

- Can an
XDI endpoint have a special notion of the XDI endpoint "belonging" to
a user?

- Is yes,
does that user automatically have "full rights" to the XDI endpoint
outside of normal link contract evaluation?

- As an
alternative to signing XDI messages with a key, can an XDI message contain a
user's password for authentication?

 

We did not
have time to consider these on the call, so we will tackle them in email.

 

In
addition, Bill poised the question: Rather than say will XDI use auth
mechanism A or B, what are people's thoughts on considering a broader mechanism
support so that implementors can decide? I'm specifically thinking of support
for using SASL mechanisms (see links below):

 

 http://asg.web.cmu.edu/sasl/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Authentication_and_Security_Layer

 

 

6) X3J (X3
FOR JSON) SERIALIZATION FORMAT PROGRESS

 

http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/xdi/201002/msg00027.html

http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/xdi/201001/msg00010.html

 

Since the XDI
Serialization Spec is so important for implementations, we checked on progress
and next steps. Bill reported that he is working on it, with release deferred
right now until he moves, which is in late July or early August.

 

7) WORKING
DRAFTS

 

Drummond
opined that due to the increasing visibility of XDI through PDX, it was time
for the TC to move from the wiki to formal OASIS  Working Draft specifications. Bill agreed. Drummond said he
may have some time in July to convert the current wiki specs to OASIS Working Draft formats (but no promises yet). It was
agreed that the Addressing and Graph Model spec and the Serialization spec
should be the first two Working Drafts.

 

We
discussed the possible source document formats XML is preferred.

 

# DRUMMOND
to check with Will Norris of the XRI TC for his guidance on OASIS XML source formats.

 

 

8) NEW BUSINESS

 

Bill
proposed two additional topics for the email list: 

SASL or not to SASL

FOAF vocabulary contrasted with
     current PDX vocabulary, FOAF in XDI?

 

 

9) NEXT
CALL

 

The next
call will be next week at the regular time. We will use the normal dial-in
bridge number and an IdearPad to keep live notes.