I haven’t blogged in a month because I’m so heads down with XRI 2.1 specs, prep for IIW (next week), and the business side of user-centric identity (yes, this really needs to turn into an industry if it is to ever really matter). But I could not help but note the explosion of discussion around Tim Bray’s post that Sun will be using OpenID and — gasp! — actually providing a semantically meaningful OpenID identifier! I can’t reference the discussion on the Identity Gang mailing list per community agreement, but see:
If this raises a ruckus, imagine the concept of an entire LANGUAGE for machine-proveable assertions using machine-readable identifiers. Imagine if Sun could move from it’s current “tincture of trust” to a simple yet provable assertion like…
@sun+employee=example.name
…which is itself would be a valid OpenID under the proposed OpenID 2.0 spec and the proposed XRI 2.1 syntax.
With XRI 2.1 and the XDI RDF model, about which I’ll start blogging much more extensively after IIW, that’s what we’ll have laid the foundation for. A semantic web where the semantics are actually in the identfiers.
Exactly the way it works with human language.
What a concept.
Equals Drummond 