Agenda: XDI TC Telecon Friday 09:00 - 10:30AM PT 2013-09-13

XDI TC Agenda

Following is the agenda for the unofficial telecon of the XDI TC at:

Date:  Friday, 13 September 2013 USA
Time:  09:00AM - 10:30AM Pacific Time (16:00-17:30 UTC)

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AGENDA
NEWS & UPDATES

None scheduled.

PRESENTATIONS/DISCUSSIONS
Progress on Working Drafts

Resolve question of how spec changes should be committed.

Report on progress on XDI Core and XDI Messaging.

Link Contract Terminology: Requesting Party and Authorizing Party

It is proposed that these terms replace “acceptor” and “initiator”. See https://wiki.oasis-open.org/xdi/LinkContractPattern

Link Contract Initiation

If there is time, continue our discussion of link contract initiation, focusing on the structure of the three related versions of a link contract:

A link contract template.

A link contract instance.

A meta link contract.

See https://wiki.oasis-open.org/xdi/LinkContractPattern

DECISION POINTS FOR THIS CALL
Graph Notation

Drummond started a thread about revisions to our graph notation.

https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/xdi/201309/msg00011.html

https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/xdi/201309/msg00020.html

We will try to reach consensus about the notation, as we will be using it in XDI Core.

Terminology: Collection and Member

In looking at the original XDI Core spec outline a few weeks ago, Markus noted that the terms “class” was used twice—once for context symbols (+ and $) and once for a context function (square brackets). To avoid this confusion, Drummond suggests that we refer to the context function as a collection and to instances inside this collection as members.

This is already reflected in an update to the Graph Model Structure wiki page so you can review it there.

No Nested Members

In working on the ABNF, Drummond felt that the XDI ABNF would be simpler and parsers could be simpler if members of a collection could not be nested. Markus then came up with a solution, which is that whenever you need to nest members of a collection, you just nest the same collection. An obvious example is nesting of XDI messages (in which the nested collection also needed to be ordered):

=sender[$msg]!:uuid:1234[$msg]#0

=sender[$msg]!:uuid:1234[$msg]#1

=sender[$msg]!:uuid:1234[$msg]#2

Attributes Not Containing Entities

Another simplification Drummond realized is that attributes should not need to contain entities. He was not able to come up with a single good example of where that would be needed. Furthermore, it would simplify the graph structure to adopt that rule, i.e.:

Roots can contain roots, entities, and attributes (but not values).

Entities can contain entities and attributes (but not values).

Attributes can only contain attributes and (if not a collection) a value.

Dictionary Syntax

Another inconsistency that has been bothering Drummond is that, after the syntax simplication, all context functions used exclusively bracket syntax EXCEPT dictionary definitions.

(=markus)	<== root

[+passport]	<== collection

<+tel>		<== attribute

{foo}		<== variable

$(+passport)	<== definition

It would be cleaner and easier if there was also a uniform bracket syntax for definitions. One option would be to use double brackets:

[[+passport]]	<== definition

Markus suggested that we could use pipes:

|+passport|	<== definition

And one more thought is not to use brackets at all but define the a dictionary context by using a single instance of a class context symbol. This could be either + or $, i.e.:

++passport	<== definition

$+passport	<== definition

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.