[OpenID] openid, foaf and attribute exchange

[Mark Wahl]

Story Henry wrote:

>    - duplicating effort. This spec is inventing a metadata format, a  
> query language and storage API, which is a lot of work. These things  
> have been done before:
>       + metadata framework: as shown above RDF does this very well  
> already. It has a very powerful semantics, has gone through years of  
> review by some of the best thinkers in the world, is extensible, self  
> describing, etc, etc... having to learn another special convention as  
> proposed here, is one more unnecessary piece of work.

Actually there has not yet been defined a suitable protocol-indepdendent 
metadata format for identity schemas elements such as attribute types
and claim types. "RDF" by itself is insufficient as there has not yet
been defined ontologies for identity schemas.  To address this the
Identity Commons Identity Schemas working group is defining a common set
of metadata representation elements for OpenID (and CardSpace and others
emerging protocols); a work-in-progress can be seen at
http://idschemas.idcommons.net/moin.cgi/MetaData
which can be expressed in RDF and retrieved via "GET", as described in
http://idschemas.idcommons.net/moin.cgi/BasicRetrieval


Mark Wahl
Informed Control Inc.