My sparcity of posts in August equates directly to the intensity of work going on right now on the XRI 2.0 specifications at OASIS. After the XRI 2.0 Committee Draft 01 specifications were approved by the XRI Technical Committee (TC) in March, they underwent a public review period which drew a variety of excellent comments. This plus implementation feedback from a growing community of both commercial and open source implementers is now being folded into the Committee Draft 02 specifications which are scheduled for a TC vote by mid-October and an OASIS-wide vote in December.

When you’re this close to the open standards “sausage making” process, it’s nice to see growing recognition of how these standards can solve the problems they were designed for. A wonderful example is the article Mary Hodder (Napsterization) about the recent Yahoo/Flicker ID snafu. She does a great job of explaining how i-names (XRIs that functional as universal, privacy-protected addresses for people or organizations) could avoid this problem altogether.

And Phil Windley, who is co-hosting the Internet Identity Workshop in Berkeley in October, adds his perspective to Mary’s in his post at Between the Lines.

(And that’s before we even get to how XRIs can help with the Open Tagging problem, a subject about which I am very excited and only wish I had more time to work on. But first let’s get XRI 2.0 out the door!!!)