Minutes: XDI TC Telecon Friday 2013-04-05

XDI TC Minutes

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

Date:  Friday, 5 April 2013 USA
Time:  09:00AM - 10:30AM Pacific Time (16:00-17:30 UTC)

ATTENDING

Markus Sabadello

Les Chasen

Drummond Reed

Phil Windley

Joseph Boyle

Animesh Chowdhury

PRESENTATIONS/DISCUSSIONS
DOCBOOK TEMPLATE

Markus took a look at it. He said the XML looks reasonably simple.

He suggests that we should look at Docbook editors. He said you have to install several tools as an editor in order to generate files.

# ALL EDITORS - look over the Docbook template and prepare questions.

# DRUMMOND - email Chet and Ken about a Q & A call with Ken.

DECISION POINTS FOR THIS CALL

This week's decision queue is the following set of proposals:

ABNF REVISIONS

After last week’s discussions about the JSON data model, Markus and Drummond have worked up an ABNF that reflects the JSON model but goes further to address a key missing feature that the JSON model did not address, which is the distinction between entities and attributes that was captured in the Context Functions proposal. This ABNF is in the latest comment on the ABNF discussion page:

   https://wiki.oasis-open.org/xdi/XdiAbnf/Discussion

See also these related pages:

   https://wiki.oasis-open.org/xdi/XdiAbnf

   https://wiki.oasis-open.org/xdi/JsonModel

   https://wiki.oasis-open.org/xdi/ContextFunctions

Following is an example of the one revision that the proposed new ABNF requires in the syntax compared to last week’s consensus: that attribute contexts are enclosed in < > brackets and value contexts are enclosed in << >>  brackets.  An example of what this looks like for a set of 3 email addresses follows. In this example:

3 instances of an email attribute are listed first.

3 references to those 3 instances to provide ordering are listed second.

The final statement is the singleton syntax for an attribute: !< > . This allows a separate address to be used to declare a singleton.

=drummond<+email>!uuid:f81d4fae-7dec-11d0-a765-00a0c91e0001<<$string>>/<>/

     ””

=drummond<+email>!uuid:9ce739f0-7665-11e2-bcfd-0800200c0002<<$string>>/<>/

     ””

=drummond<+email>!uuid:3a96e460-7be9-11e2-b92a-0800200c0003<<$string>>/<>/

     ””

=drummond+email[1]/$ref/

     =drummond+email!uuid:f81d4fae-7dec-11d0-a765-00a0c91e0001

=drummond+email[2]/$ref/

     =drummond+email!uuid:9ce739f0-7665-11e2-bcfd-0800200c0002

=drummond+email[3]/$ref/

     =drummond+email!uuid:3a96e460-7be9-11e2-b92a-0800200c0003

=drummond!<+email>/$ref/

     =drummond+email!uuid:f81d4fae-7dec-11d0-a765-00a0c91e0001

Markus showed an updated version of the XDI2 Validator tool that works with the proposed new ABNF.

He noted one problem: ! segments cannot contain other ! segments.

# DRUMMOND to check into this.

We talked about variants on the <<datatype>> syntax. The preference was still to use double chevrons, although it would be nice if this was not needed.

There was feedback from developer meetings during the previous week that questioned how necessary it was to have the data type.

# DRUMMOND to check into alternatives.

JSON SERIALIZATION OPTIONS

Joseph and Drummond were able to meet last Thursday to go over new options for the JSON serialization that could be more developer friendly by not requiring parsing of the XDI subject/predicate keys in order to build an XDI graph object model (GOM).

Joseph ran us through his proposal for an alternate JSON serialization. 

   https://wiki.oasis-open.org/xdi/JSONSerializationRules/Discussion

The basic structure is:

Each XDI statement is a array of three elements.

Each element is a sequence of objects.

Each object describes the context and the value.

The benefit is that parsing is already done. A developer can just serialize the graph object model directly without parsing.

The consensus was that it would be good to have a standard graph object model. Markus showed the UML model he had developed for the second generation XDI graph model:

  https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/39704/XDI4j-UML-diagram.png

ACTION ITEMS

# JOSEPH AND MARKUS - produce a UML model that corresponds to the ABNF and look at the options for how to serialize this directly.

DECISION POINT QUEUE REVIEW

The decision queue stack is shown on the following three auto-generated Category pages:

  https://wiki.oasis-open.org/xdi/CategoryLastCall

  https://wiki.oasis-open.org/xdi/CategoryCurrent

  https://wiki.oasis-open.org/xdi/CategoryHighPriority

See also this list of proposals that need to be developed:

  https://wiki.oasis-open.org/xdi/XdiPendingIssues

NEXT CALL
The next call is next week at the regular time.