Minutes: XDI TC Telecon Thursday 1:00-2:30PM PT 2012-02-09

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

Date:  Thursday, 09 February 2012 USA

Time:  1:00PM - 2:30PM Pacific Time (21:00-22:30 UTC)

ATTENDING

Giovanni Bartolomeo 

Bill Barnhill 

Mike Schwartz

Drummond Reed 

Markus Sabadello 

Joseph Boyle 

THE IDEARPAD LINK FOR TODAY IS:

     http://xdi.idearpad.org/53

1) IDTRUST BUDGET PROPOSAL

OASIS
 had concerns that the first proposal for showing interop between XDI 
clients and servers didn't fit the usual public interop demo scenario 
that OASIS typically provides partial funding for. Mike offered another 
option: a combination of interop server hosting and sponsoring a session
 at European Identity Conference, given that OASIS is going to have a 
presence at EIC.

We
 discussed the option of putting it towards an "XDI Workshop" or "XDI 
Bar Camp" that would be both an "Introduction to XDI" marketing event 
and a working meeting of the TC. Mike suggested we look at the following
 opttions.

IIW, May 1-3. Markus, Bill, Drummond, Mike, Joseph thought they might be able to attend.

Cloud Identity Summit, July 16-20: Bill, Mike, Drummond, Joesph, and maybe Markus might be able to attend.

It was concluded to run this option by Dee Schur and see what she thinks.

2) OPEN SOURCE PROJECT AND OTHER UPDATES

Mike
 gave an update on the OpenXDI project. They are focused now on building
 an example application. A key issue is knowing which link contract to 
use. Another key implementation issue is storage of binary data. The 
current focus is to finish the demo, then look at the next revision.

Markus provided an update on Project Danube. He has started a new implementation with a fresh code base, which right now contains the basic graph model, JSON serialization format, and Berkeley DB for persistence.

Drummond gave a high-level summary of the progress he has been making with the Respect Network initiative.

Mike said there are two SXSW events on Saturday 3/10 at his office: Personal Data Lightning Round, 1-3pm and Identity Biergarten 6-8pm. Also the SXSW SSO meetup event is on Tuesday 3/13.

3) LINK CONTRACT REFERENCES IN XDI MESSAGES

Mike
 said that as the OpenXDI Project has been implementing their current 
school-related application, it has been difficult for the client to keep
 track of the link contracts that it can operate under. Mike proposed 
that clients be able to leave out the link contract reference in the XDI
 message. 

Drummond
 was very worried about this. He and Bill both suggested that it is 
necessary for the client to know the identity/relationship in which it 
is requesting XDI access, so all it is doing is just "shifting the pain"
 to the server.

We
 discussed several solutions, including an aggregate link contract and 
the use of wildcards in the link contract reference. It was agreed we 
would look first at the proposed new patterns and then revisit this.

3) LITERAL CONTEXTS PROPOSAL

This past week Drummond posted updated versions of all 3 core XDI documents:

  http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/xdi/201202/msg00007.html

The
 most significant update is the "literal contexts" proposal, in  which 
all RDF literals are modeled with an XDI literal context. As  explained 
in Drummond's message:

This gives every literal in the XDI graph its own XDI address without using a cross-reference - simplifying navigation and XRI processing time.

This makes it much cleaner to express and navigate XDI metadata, such as datestamps and versioning.

This simplifies parsing and serialization, since all semantics describing a literal will be in the XDI subject identifying it,  and every XDI literal (now called a "terminal") will have an XDI  predicate consisting only of "!".

# DRUMMOND to research whether any other XRI delimiter could be used for a literal.

We
 also talked about the ordinal pattern for explicitly stating ordering. 
Bill pointed out that this pattern would also support $next as a 
different option for traversing ordered lists. Giovanni suggested a 
LISP-like approach using $source and $rest.

4) NESTED ROOT CONTEXTS PROPOSAL

The revised XDI docs also show nested root contexts. As explained in Drummond's message:

This
 provides a clean way to model the relationship of different  local XDI 
graphs available at different XDI network endpoints for the  purposes of
 XDI discovery.

This
 shows how a single physical XDI server (such as an LDAP server,  SQL 
database, NOSQL database, etc.) can implement a "multi-tenant" model  
where it can host multiple independent local XDI graphs yet still have  
them logically appear as part of the global XDI graph.

6) NEXT CALL

The next call is next week at the regular time.