Minutes: XDI TC Telecon Friday 2013-06-07

[My apologies for sending these minutes late -- I was tied up last weekend and then on travel all this week.]
XDI TC Minutes

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

Date:  Friday, 7 June 2013 USA
Time:  09:00AM - 10:30AM Pacific Time (16:00-17:30 UTC)

ATTENDING

Joseph Boyle

Markus Sabadello

Dan Blum

Animesh Chowdhury 

Drummond Reed

Phil Windley

REGRETS

Les Chasen (vacation)

PRESENTATIONS/DISCUSSIONS
SPEC TEMPLATES

Joseph requested that we look at the DocBook template.

# DRUMMOND to contact Chet Ensign.

DECISION POINTS FOR THIS CALL

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

ABNF

On our review of the revised ABNF:

  https://wiki.oasis-open.org/xdi/XdiAbnf/Discussion (see the 2013-05-05 comment)

  https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/xdi/201305/msg00055.html 

Joseph reported that he was not able to complete these action items from last week’s telecon, so he will aim for the following week:

Finish the Graph Tree grammar.

Create a list of any open issues for discussion with the TC.

Recommend solutions for identifying the serialization type.

JSON SERIALIZATION OPTIONS

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

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

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

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

Joseph asked what decision the TC had made about MIME types.

Markus’s recollection was:

We would have two mime types.

One would be for the display format.

The second one would be for the JSON type.

For the JSON type, the subtype parameter would be form and the values would be flat, tree, and parse.

Joseph mentioned that JSON-LD uses a pattern of key-value formats. 

# JOSEPH to post a proposal for MIME type parameters.

We then discussed our history of JSON serialization formats. Drummond explained the background on the different formats to Dan:

How it took us ~2 years to arrive at a single JSON format (what is currently the flat format).

That was our only format for ~18 months.

Then in January the two new formats (tree and parse) grew out of suggestions from Joseph.

Joseph said he believes it is not a problem right now for us to have multiple formats so that we can get developer feedback about which one is preferred. Drummond agreed, but he said that there would soon afterwards be tremendous pressure on the TC to adopt a single format.

At that point Phil joined the call, and shared the view that he would strongly prefer we converge on one format.

Joseph brought up that SPARQL currently supports four different formats for results including XML, JSON, and tab-delimited. And the query format is yet another format (text-based, similar to SQL). 

Phil said that SPARQL like SQL can also be serialized in multiple formats, but those are “query response formats” and not over-the-wire data interchange formats. For the latter a single canonical format would be very desirable.

XDI SECURITY PATTERNS

We continued our review of mechanisms for XDI message authentication and authorization and how they align with OAuth and PKI.

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

   https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/xdi/201305/msg00048.html 

Markus showed a set of security patterns that cover many common scenarios for interacting with XDI endpoints (which in a cloud computing paradigm are often referred to as “clouds”).

The scenarios fall into two groups. The first group is authentication/authorization TO a endpoint.

Shared Secret 1

Shared Secret 2

OAuth Authorization Code

OAuth Implicit

OAuth Resource Owner Credentials

OAuth Client Credentials

PKI 1

PKI 2

PKI 3

The second one is authentication WITH an XDI endpoint.

OpenID Connect

Markus took the time to walk us through each of the scenarios he had diagrammed so far.

Phil had to leave the meeting at this point but provided the following feedback:

The scenarios that Markus covers matches ones that Phil’s team has been discussing and planning for.

He very much likes the format that Markus is using -- it is simple and clear.

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..