[OpenID] AddId! - A useful idea of mine?!

Paul Trevithick paul at socialphysics.org
Thu Feb 1 19:53:37 UTC 2007


As Rowan says, a fairly clear distinction can be made between the metadata
description of an attribute, and how that attribute is transported around. 

The conversation over at IdSchemas is mostly about metadata description of
attributes (and, to a lesser extent, sets of them called "schemas"). Not
about transport. 

URI-based attribute types have advantages over older (pre-web) non-URI
methods. Here are a few off the top of my head:
- they exist in global namespace with lots of flexibility and extensibility.
This namespace simultaneously allows both (a) anyone to create their own if
they want t), and (b) well known types (e.g.
http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/givenname).
- it is easy to wrap any existing attribute type (e.g. from vcard, hcard) in
a URI (we just need to define a std wrapping/mapping) whereas the converse
is not true
- they can be XRIs (Drummond can wax on here about XDI dictionaries)
- they can be self-describing (a new-to-me idea the Dick taught me). That
is, they can be URLs that can be de-referenced to a metadata document that
describes them. 
- they are well suited to having RDF metadata describing them

But then again, if the transport doesn't use URIs, then we just need (a) to
know precisely what schema its attributes are based on (e.g. hcard) and (b)
to have a common agreement on how to wrap/map an attribute into a URI (so
that one can then go find its describing metadata). This (b) IS something
that I think we will be doing at IdSchemas (identityschemas.org).  

-Paul

> -----Original Message-----
> From: general-bounces at openid.net [mailto:general-bounces at openid.net] On
> Behalf Of Rowan Kerr
> Sent: Thursday, February 01, 2007 1:00 PM
> To: general at openid.net
> Subject: Re: [OpenID] AddId! - A useful idea of mine?!
> 
> On 2/1/07, Chris Messina <chris.messina at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I strongly advocate for using XOXO, xFolk, hcard and XFN here.
> 
> How about AX schemas to define the data used in each of those formats?
> Then the transport may be different (HTML vs Openid Auth message),
> but the attributes would be the same.
> 
> -Rowan
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