As I found myself explaining to a number of folks at Digital ID World this week, the XDI Technical Committee at OASIS has been relatively quiet this spring and summer while so many of the TC members worked on: a) completing the XRI 2.0 suite of specifications, and b) bringing up fully operational XRI infrastructure, including the XDI.org Global Registry Service and the initial set of XDI.org-Accredited I-Brokers.

Now that this has been accomplished, it’s time for the XDI TC to kick back into high gear and start putting out the XDI 1.0 specification suite. In many ways the job has become easier because we’ve learned so much from XRI infrastructure, plus cross-domain data sharing requirements are becoming much better understood through projects like Higgins.

I had a great chance to talk XDI with Johannes Ernst at Digital ID World, who has been developing a framework called InfoGrid that uses many similar concepts. He blogged his initial impressions, and I encourage Johannes and any other distributed data architects who would like to help in the birth of a universal data interchange protocol to join us on the XDI TC as we ramp up our work again this fall. If you have any questions just drop me a note through my contact page.