Equals Drummond

At the Glue Conference this week I’m enjoying a great set of speakers lined up by Eric Norlin on the topic of how everything in the networked universe gets glued together using Web 2.0 tools and beyond. (The talk Mitch Kapor gave this morning was worth the trip all by itself.)

In a few minutes I’ll be on a panel called Implementing the Open Web. In chatting with Lloyd Hilaiel of Yahoo, Kevin Mullins of MIT, and Phil Windley of Kynetx about this topic last night, we hit on one key point that Phil articulated this way: “People tend to conflate ‘open’ with ‘public domain’, i.e.,  that anything that qualifies as open must be freely available to all.”

It struck me how true this is. It reminds me of the Richard Stallman quote describing open source (cited in the Wikipedia Gratis versus Libre article): “Think free as in free speech, not free beer.”

In terms of data on the Open Web, what this means that even though a particular pool of data may be available via an open standard, publicly-accessible interface, it does NOT mean this data must be publicly available to anyone. If that were true, the whole concept of a personal data store — a key premise of VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) — would not be possible.

So what makes any system or node participating in the Web “open” is not that its data is public, but that the metadata and services for accessing it are available via a publicly discoverable, open-standard interface. The public discovery portion of this is the goal of the XRD work now underway at the XRI Technical Committee at OASIS (based on the original XRDS work – see this blog post by Eran Hammer-Lahav of Yahoo to understand the differences). The open standard portion is the output of IETF, W3C, OASIS, and all the other SSOs (standards-setting organizations) for the net. (The potential of the Open Web Foundation, once it finishes its bootstrap stage, is to make this process of creating open standards even more lightweight and distributed.)

This combination – open discovery of open interfaces accessible over open protocols – is the DNA of the Open Web. And it applies equally to both public and private data. In fact it can finally open up what might be called the Permissioned Web - the Web of all all data that any one party has permission from other parties to access.

That would lead us to the need for integrating identity and permissions with the data, which brings us to the motivations for XDI as a semantic data sharing format/protocol – but my panel is about to start so that will have to be another post.

One advantage of having a 13-year old son is that you have an excuse to go see a summer blockbuster movie on the very first night it comes out.

I never did that as a kid, which is one reason I let my son (and his biggest ally in such guilty pleasures, my wife) talk me into it.

And boy, was it worth it. I love films, especially world class dramas, but there’s something extra special about a Hollywood popular movie that somehow turns fun into its own high art. The first Pirates of the Caribbean, the original Spiderman film (and to a lesser extent the third), and last summer’s Dark Knight all fit this bill.

Now you can add this Star Trek. Where exactly they found the energy, humor, and drive in this film I have no idea. How it plays gently, lovingly, and brilliantly off the original while at the same time channelling its own unique spirit and energy still has me doing a mental whistle each time I think about it.

This one will be a good old-fashion b-l-o-c-k-b-u-s-t-e-r at the box office. But don’t go see it for that reason. Go because it will make you happy that so many generations can enjoy a story for so many generations.

Having just been to RSA, which is the essence of a trade show, and being about to go to Gluecon, which I’m hoping will be the essence of a conference, I find the distinction between conferences and trade shows that Eric makes in this blog post very useful.

Of course, the most conferency conference is an unconference like the Internet Identity Workshop. If you’ve never been to an unconference like this, you MUST try it. (Warning: you’ll never want to go back.)

When I told a friend that I was “adding yet another hat” by taking on the Interim Executive Director role at the Information Card Foundation, he said I had so many hats it reminded him of this children’s book. I haven’t read it (and probably won’t — my kids are into Da Vinci Code and Ender’s Game now).

Quite a few of those hats came from helping start  non-profits in the Internet identity industry. However this is the first time I’ve stepped into the E.D. role, and all those hats are part of the reason. I really do feel it’s time to move the industry towards convergence. I believe a selector-based identity model can get us there, and I’ll be reaching out to all the communities I’ve been part of — and others I haven’t yet been part of — to help get us there.

Look for lots of new things coming out of the ICF in the next few months.

Yes, I am now among the ecstatic legions with an iPhone – if my Samsung had not managed to last so long I would have jumped long ago. And now I’m as happy as all those other souls.

After 10 days of use, though, I have noticed a few small but surprising shortcomings in the otherwise killer UI:

• No cut-and-paste of text. Given that this is the best-known shortcoming, I can’t believe it hasn’t been addressed yet.
• No ability to highlight text and then delete it. You can only backspace it out. Really limits text editing.
• No reordering of information for a contact. Phone numbers (work, home, mobile) not only appear in random order after a sync with Outlook (apparently a sync issue), but there’s no way to reorder them (drag and drop does not work). What would fix both problems is the ability to set a default order for contact info and have every contact use it, so it’s consistent throughout. I just dialed someone’s fax number because it was the first on the list, where I expected their mobile to be.
• No ability to see the exact number of a recent incoming call. Given that this was the only option my old Samsung offered (it wouldn’t show the contact name on the received calls list), I was very surprised to find out that the iPhone does the opposite: it lists the contact name, but not the number. So if the contact has a landline and a mobile, you can’t find out which one they just tried you on – you just have to guess. (Update 2009-03-11: I learned via a comment that the iPhone does highlight the number the contact used on the page displayed when you click the blue arrow next to the name on the recent calls list. However on some iPhones this highlight is red, whereas on mine it is blue, which was too subtle for me to notice and understand what it meant. I’d like the ability to control this highlight color in preferences.)
• No ability to edit a contact off the recent calls list. Especially when you are first using a phone, you want to be able to add contact info for a call you just received. You can do this if the caller is not in your contact list yet. But if the caller IS already in your contact list…no dice. You are forced to switch to the Contacts app and look up the contact again there. Not intuitive at all (but, like cut-and-paste, probably has to do with apps not being able to talk to one another?)

’nuff said. Doesn’t make me rave about the iPhone any less. Just makes me want perfection to be even more perfect.

Spring is around the corner and that means IIW. The next one is May 18-20 in the standard location: the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

Early registration is particularly important this year – 75 registrations are needed by the end of March to secure the space.

This continues to be, year after year, where Internet identity happens. If you have to pick only one identity event to attend, this is it.

See you there.

Paul’s done a post about his writeup of password cards on the Higgins wiki. IMHO this is  a long overdue idea for how an identity client (”selector” in information card terms) can overcome the chicken-and-egg adoption problem.

Selectors are like browsers – the more of them people start using, the more sites become card-enabled. It won’t work the other way around. So the trick is issuing i-cards that provide real end-user value before sites start issuing them for login, cross-domain claims transfer, etc.

More about that soon.

The Craig Burton is at it again. Putting together all kinds of cool memes. This time he’s seen how to splice XRI into the FollowFriday endorsement system for Twitter. He calls the concept “microtagging” – using XRIs in the tag space (+plumber, +doctor, +analyst, etc.) to categorize FollowFriday endorsements for aggregation on Scott Lemon’s TopFollowFriday aggregator.

Blows my mind. Who ever thought the structured semantic web would start evolving on Twitter?? But that’s just how this organic Internet thing happens…

If you need to understand Internet identity quickly and at a deeper level than you can glean from blog posts and trade journals, but don’t want to hire a dedicated consultant, Eugene Kim’s Blue Oxen Associates has a great answer: his Sensemaking Series is doing a series on Internet Identity. The series expert is my former XRI TC co-chair Gabe Wachob, who I can recommend hands down as knowing the space cold. Better yet, Gabe is famous for never hyping anything — he calls it just the way he sees it.

Plus the format – a set of four 90-minute sessions with a limit of five session attendees plus the expert – maximizes the information/effort ratio.

It’s a great design from two of the best people I know in the industry.

I made a long post about it when Bob first presented it at IIW and then the Burton Catalyst conference last June. Now anyone can get it here. See also Bob’s commentary on its evolution here.

Highly recommended for understanding the underlying dynamics of identity and relationship on the net.

More about the long quiet spell soon. First I must post about a trip I made last week to spend the day with Phil Windley, his partner Stephen Fulling, and the inimitable Craig Burton down in Salt Lake City.

What Phil and company are doing at Kynetx is earthshaking. There’s not much info on the website yet, but last week Phil posted a white paper The Advent of Next Generation Browsing that introduces the whole concept of structured browsing. I won’t even bother to try to explain it here; just get the paper and read it. Then read another one of Joe Andrieu’s exceedingly cogent essays with his impressions, criticisms, and suggestions about the Kynetx vision of structured browsing and how it fits with Joe’s work on search maps. Also read Phil’s reply to Joe.

The rules language Phil wrote (KRL – Kynetx Rules Language) is at the heart of their solution for structured browsing. I am a huge fan of what rules languages can do with structured identifiers and structured information. That’s what I was down in Salt Lake talking with Phil, Stephen, and Craig about. Phil followed it up with a great post, First Class Namespaces in Programming Languages, that sums up how XRI and XDI might fit with KRL.

Did I say earthshaking? Watch out when this quake breaks loose.

Something else so good I just have to blog it: Eran Hammer-Lahav’s Discovery Coordination Report on the new metadata-discovery list he set up. Eran’s turning into a one-man hub of all things discovery as he drives forward together with the rest of the OASIS XRI TC towards the pushing out the new XRD 1.0 spec.

I have high hopes for this spec and Eran is one of the key reasons (plus the efforts of his co-editor Nat Sakimura of NRI, who is working OpenID miracles in Japan, and other new TC members who have joined to finally make simple, safe, uniform metadata discovery a reality on the Web).

I love this word — and it’s meaning — so much I just had to post this after David Recordon used it in an OpenID general list post and gave the following attribution.

Should be part of every techie’s daily vobulary. Watch out for bikeshedding!

For most people, watching the evolution of technical specifications is like watching a glacier move. To those of us living the process, though, there can be a great deal of drama to it — in fact it’s much more like climbing an icefall inside the glacier (anyone doubting how much adrenaline that takes should read John Krakauer’s description in Into Thin Air of climbing Mt. Everest’s Khumbu Icefall). For example, the failure of the OASIS Standard vote on the XRI 2.0 specifications last May — the first ever in 40+ OASIS Standard votes — was a watershed in the interaction of two standards bodies (W3C and OASIS).

The repercussions from that event have been equally unpredictable. Who would have thought that just four months later the XRI TC and W3C TAG would have rough consensus on how to resolve their differences? Or that the discussions would spill over to the much larger topic of uniform metadata discovery on the Web? Or that discovery could turn out to be the key to building identity into the browser? Or that interest in the XRDS discovery format would boil up enough to beget a new spec intended for uniform metadata discovery for any type of URI or XRI?

But that’s just what has happened. Two weeks ago at the Internet Identity Workshop, Eran Hammer-Lahav, author of the OAuth Discovery spec and founder of the XRDS-Simple list, led a marathon session on a new uniform metadata discovery specification to be called XRD 1.0. With 20 to 40 people in attendance all afternoon, Eran first ran through his exhaustively-researched blog post on HTTP and discovery, then through the proposed simplifications to the current XRDS/XRD schema. By the end there was rough consensus on XRD as a mechanism for uniform metadata discovery across all the different Internet identity and data sharing specs that need it (XRI, OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, XDI, Data Portability, etc.)

The name “XRD” is itself quite revealing of the evolutionary path to this point. When the OASIS XRI TC first developed the XML-based metadata discovery format we needed for XRI resolution back in 2003, we called it XRID (XRI Descriptor). We made it as simple and generalized as we could simply because any resource could have an XRI, so there was no telling what type of metadata might be needed over time. We focused primarily on one clear requirement: given input identifier x and service type y, define how to discover service endpoint URI z.

By 2005, when OpenID grew to the point of needing a discovery format, the authors of the Yadis (Yet Another Discovery spec) authors looked at XRID and saw something very close to what they needed. But XRID assumed you needed a sequence of descriptors corresponding to an XRI resolution chain. With OpenID a sequence wasn’t needed because an http(s) URI would have just one descriptor. So the XRI TC renamed the metadata format to XRD (Extensible Resource Descriptor) and created a separate XML wrapper element called XRDS (XRD Sequence) for cases like XRI resolution where you needed to wrap a sequence of XRDs.

However for cross-compatibility between XRI and OpenID, OpenID discovery just assumed the outer XRDS wrapper element even if it contained only one XRD. So the discovery format became widely known by the wrapper element, XRDS.

It wasn’t until Eran’s deep-dive on uniform metadata discovery that he recognized that the base case should be the other way around, i.e., for most URIs the the base discovery document should be an XRD, and only in cases like XRI resolution do you need the XRDS wrapper element.

Since the XRI TC had already made the decision in our next round of specs to split off XRDS from XRI Resolution, it was easy to just call this new specification XRD 1.0 (”1.0″ reflecting that it is the first standalone specification for XRD). However what we didn’t realize until the XRI TC F2F meeting the day after IIW was that XRD as both a metadata discovery format and protocol would be comprehensive enough that XRI 3.0 Resolution could become simply a “profile” of XRD 1.0 — and thus dramatically shorter.

We also didn’t realize how badly many different stakeholders want a Web-wide metadata discovery mechanism. Within a week after IIW we had six new people join the XRI TC to be part of the XRD work, and as of this writing nine more are in the queue.

So the roadmap of the next generation of XRI TC outputs is clear now. We will produce two OASIS Standard-track specifications:

• XRI 3.0 (including Syntax, Resolution, and Bindings) as a uniform syntax and resolution protocol for shared semantics across hierarchical URI schemes.
• XRD 1.0 for uniform metadata discovery for any URI or XRI.

Stay tuned for updates – hopefully this set of specs will set a glacier speed record.

I could go on for hours about the value of Wikipedia to every person on this planet. But let me go right to the bottom line: take a few seconds to show your own appreciation for by making a donation. (With PayPal it literally takes 30 seconds.)

Personally, I include Wikipedia among my charitable contributions because no matter what other cause you support, it’s very hard to argue that a better way to share and disburse knowledge in this world isn’t a contribution to that cause as well.

So I consider my Wikipedia donation an “automatic matching contribution” for every other donation I make.

Whenever I find myself recommending a book more than two or three times, it’s easier to just put a link here and point people at it. It’s definitely time to do that for Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist. It’s the second “you must read this” book recommended to me by Parity CEO Paul Trevithick (the last one was Made to Stick, which I also blogged about).

At last week’s Internet Identity Workshop I must have told a dozen people to read this book. It’s not that it’s filled with blazing insights about a notoriously inaccessible topic. It’s rather that the book patiently and carefully explains the real basics of RDF, RDFS, OWL, and the SemWeb using everyday examples that working developers and architects can wrap their heads around. It’s the most example-intensive technical book I’ve ever read, and when it comes to the SemWeb, I’m convinced that’s the right approach.

And one thing is for sure: you can’t read this book without coming away with a much deeper understanding of the power of the concept of inference, especially as it relates to the SemWeb.

I especially recommend this book to anyone interested in XRI and XDI — the former because one of of the strongest emerging use cases for XRI is sharing semantics across contexts, and the latter because XDI is a semantic protocol that uses XRIs to encode RDF statements (some of which can as filled with inferences as natural language statements).

Net net: if you’ve always wanted to understand the SemWeb but been afraid to try, treat yourself to this geek Christmas present.

I don’t think I’ve ever made a political post in this blog, but tonight is an exception.

We’ve never had an election like this. In my lifetime, I’ve never seen one man and his family and his campaign have such an impact on the direction of this country and this planet.

My wife and I were in tears watching Obama’s acceptance speech with our two sons. Just what it means to see Barack and Michelle and his daughters going to the White House – it’s a symbol to every last one of us of what is possible not just in this country but in every country.

It’s also a huge first step towards restoring our good name in the world.

It is a turning point for the 21st century? No one can say for sure. But I’m going to wake up tomorrow with more hope in my heart for my boy’s future than I have in a long time.

It’s now longer just Yes We Can.

It’s Now We Will.

Pam Dingle has a wonderful suggestion about how Firefox should proceed with automatic updates. Those of us building identity selector technology that integrates closely with browsers need stable browsers to work with. That’s always tough after a major release, but Pam’s suggestion makes sense.

Nat Sakimura, who is quietly implementing real user-centric identity solutions in the Japanese market while many others are still talking about them, has posted his concise reasoning why XRI abstract identifiers are the the only really safe identifiers to use with OpenID.

The whole question of the differences between abstract and concrete identifiers, currently being explored in depth in conversations between the W3C TAG and the OASIS XRI TC, may turn out to be a crucial one for the soon-to-begin work on OpenID 2.1. When it comes to security, privacy, and usability, the differences really start to add up.

I was just telling a colleague in the identity industry that so many meetings are being planned for the Fall IIW, Nov. 10-12 in Mountain View, CA, that I’m not sure that there will be any time for anything else.

And it always what’s NOT planned that makes it so unforgettable.

What can I say? Don’t miss it.