XDI (short for "eXtensible Data Interchange") is a semantic data interchange format and protocol under development by the

OASIS In ecology, an oasis (; ) is a fertile area of a desert or semi-desert environment'ksar''with its surrounding feeding source, the palm grove, within a relational and circulatory nomadic system.” The location of oases has been of critical imp ...

br>XDI Technical Committee
The name comes from the addressable graph model XDI uses: every node in the XDI graph is its own RDF graph that is uniquely addressable.

Background

The main features of XDI are: the ability to link and nest RDF graphs to provide context; full addressability of all nodes in the graph at any level of context; representation of XDI operations as graph statements so authorization can be built into the graph; a standard

JSON JSON (JavaScript Object Notation, pronounced ; also ) is an open standard file format and data interchange format that uses human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consisting of attribute–value pairs and arrays (or other ser ...

serialization format; and a simple ontology language for defining shared semantics using XDI dictionary services. The XDI protocol is based on an exchange of XDI messages which themselves are XDI graphs. Since the semantics of each message is fully contained within the XDI graph of that message, the XDI protocol can be bound to multiple transport protocols. The XDI TC is defining bindings to

HTTP The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, ...

and

HTTPS Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is an extension of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). It is used for secure communication over a computer network, and is widely used on the Internet. In HTTPS, the communication protocol is enc ...

, however it is also exploring bindings to

XMPP Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP, originally named Jabber) is an open communication protocol designed for instant messaging (IM), presence information, and contact list maintenance. Based on XML (Extensible Markup Language), it ...

and potentially directly to

TCP/IP The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suit ...

. XDI also provides a standardized portable authorization format called XDI

link contract {{Unreferenced, date=January 2022 A link contract is an approach to data control in a distributed data sharing network. Link contracts are a key feature of the XDI specifications under development at OASIS. In XDI, a link contract is a machine-re ...

s. Link contracts are XDI subgraphs that express the permissions that one XDI actor (person, organization, or thing) grants to another for access to and usage of an XDI data graph. XDI link contracts enable these permissions to be expressed in a standard machine-readable format understood by any XDI endpoint. This approach to globally distributed

data sharing Data sharing is the practice of making data used for scholarly research available to other investigators. Many funding agencies, institutions, and publication venues have policies regarding data sharing because transparency and openness are consid ...

models the real-world mechanisms of

social contract In moral and political philosophy Political philosophy or political theory is the philosophical study of government, addressing questions about the nature, scope, and legitimacy of public agents and institutions and the relationships betw ...

s and legal contracts that bind civilized people and organizations in the world today. Thus XDI can be a key enabler of a distributed

Social Web The social web is a set of social relations that link people through the World Wide Web. The social web encompasses how websites and software are designed and developed in order to support and foster social interaction. These online social inte ...

. It has also been cited as a mechanism to support a new legal concept, Virtual Rights , which are based on a new legal entity, the "virtual identity", and a new fundamental right: "to have or not to have virtual identities". Public services based on the OASI
XDI
specification are under development by an international non-profit organization
XDI.org
.

External links

OASIS XDI Technical Committee

XDI.org

OASIS XDI TC wiki page with links to documents explaining the XDI graph model

Implementations

XDI2 open source XDI reference implementation in Java
Site has live utilities for experimenting directly with XDI {{OASIS Standards XML-based standards

Background

See also

External links

Implementations