Personal Cloud Discovery With XDI

Session Topic: Personal Cloud Discovery with XDI

Tuesday 3B

Convener: Markus Sabadello

Notes-taker(s): Markus Sabadello

We talked about some of the technical challenges in building a distributed system of Personal Clouds, especially around interoperability and discovery. We spent time with a demo application that illustrated how these challenges can be solved with XDI. A central part of this is the introduction of Cloud Names and Cloud Numbers, which are identifiers that are used to point to Personal Clouds and discover them. During the session, several participants registered Cloud Names for themselves.

One focus of the demo application was to show that in such a system of Personal Clouds, several parties can be involved and interact with each other in various ways, e.g. Cloud Service Providers, Registrars, Registries, and of course individual Clouds. In this system, no single centralized party is involved. Instead, XDI messages can be exchanged between any one of them in a peer-to-peer pattern.

After the initial steps of registering Cloud Names, we also looked at what XDI data looks like on the low technical level, for example when storing a "first name" attribute in a Cloud, or when linking an attribute in a Cloud to an external non-XDI data source such as Facebook. There was some discussion about how to achieve interoperability between heterogeneous data models, which in XDI can be done with "dictionaries". Finally, basic "link contract" functionality was also shown, i.e. the ability to make certain data in one's Cloud public or private.

This session effectively gave an overview of the "developer alpha" stage of XDI infrastructure that will become the basis of the Respect Network. A fully functional network with all components in place is expected for the end of the year.